The transformation of a Grade II listed proscenium arch theatre into an in-the-round performance space

The Grade II listed Playhouse Theatre in London’s West End has been sensitively remodelled to provide new hospitality space and an intimate performance space for a new production of Cabaret. A world-renowned theatre production, Cabaret immerses its audience into the illustrious Weimar-era Berlin, where the play takes place.

Working in collaboration with leading theatre consultancy Charcoalblue, Carmody Groarke has realised a unique architectural intervention that has converted a classical proscenium arch theatre into an immersive in-the-round arrangement reminiscent of early 20th century cabaret clubs.

Breaking down the scale of the auditorium, the existing raked seating to the balconies has been remodelled, ensuring excellent sight lines, with the new gallery seating carefully inserted to encircle the stage. Joining the stage and auditorium for the first time brings actors and audience to share a single space, offering a highly intimate experience.

An extensive refurbishment of the remainder of the theatre has significantly increased the front-of-house spaces with a series of new characterful bar areas and a new centralised kitchen. The careful opening up of a historic doorway has created step-free access to the building, and new back-of-house spaces have been provided to accommodate the cast and crew, wardrobe, and office areas. 

Each careful intervention extends the active life of the Playhouse, encouraging new audiences and welcoming world class productions to one of London’s iconic and historically significant theatres.

Data and Team 

Grossmarkt Theatre Pavilion

BFI Southbank 

Retain, Reuse, Reinvent
Cambridge University 

Playhouse Theatre 

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

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.

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.

Carmody Groarke's early projects are a reflection of that moment and read like dispatches from the front line. They specialised in the instant and the temporary. Building affordable housing might have been more socially useful, but that was not on offer. "You can do good work on housing and make every room count, but it was very hard to get into the social housing framework. For us, things had to start with private clients to find opportunities to build in the public realm." Nevertheless, those first projects brought them into intimate contact with parts of a city undergoing explosive change; an experience that they subsequently put to good use. One of their pavilions was in the midst of the Kings Cross redevelopment and involved the transformation of a derelict 

 into a short-life restaurant. They wrapped what was once a generic glass box, which served diesel to taxi drivers and late-night snacks to the drug dealers who frequented the area, with a new skin. It became a pop-up restaurant offering cocktails and Mexican specialities to the hipster classes under the original roof.

Street crime vanished as the area became a giant construction site, the students of Central St Martins moved in, and, finally, Google built its monster sized London HQ across the street. At the end of its three-year life, the filling station-turned-restaurant was dismantled and became the site for a sales office for the expensive apartments built within the carcase of a landmarked Victorian gasometer. The salvaged components were reassembled to make a temporary 

 in Merseyside to test ideas about therapeutic care, to feed into the creation of a permanent building in Liverpool.

 project, which took just 10 weeks from first briefing to opening night, and remained in use for less than a month, was positioned on top of a part-built shopping centre car park in Stratford. A cluster of wedge-shaped forms fabricated from scaffolding and plywood established a sense of arrival and place. A fashionable chef fed 140 diners at a time against the spectacular backdrop of the half built Olympic stadium. It was an extravagant gesture, but an arresting way for the owners of the Westfield mall opening the following year to demonstrate that Stratford, far from being at the end of the world, was in fact just nine minutes by train from St Pancras station. It was both a chance to encourage tenants to sign up, and an ideal place to start to build up the marketing campaign.

Along with a succession of similar architectural firework displays, these projects at Kings Cross and Stratford recalled what Tokyo had been through during its own bubble years in the 1980s. In both cities, land values rose so quickly that it made sense to put gaudy temporary projects on key sites and think about what to build on them for the long term later. Carmody Groarke further developed their sensibilities working with such artists as Antony Gormley and Julian Opie and on exhibitions at the 

. They were recruited by the Prada Foundation to realize Carsten Holler's 

's temporary galleries in Regent's Park. Frieze shocked the world by convincingly demonstrating that London had become a key market for contemporary art - a development that once seemed as unlikely as the proposition that the Kings Cross railway lands could be rescued from generations of squalor and neglect. Memorials and pavilions are perhaps where architecture comes the closest to art. But Carmody Groarke are experienced enough with both to have a certain humility about the limits of architecture, and an understanding that there are some things that are better left to others. "A pavilion is not burdened with water proofing or issues of longevity," they point out. "But architecture is ultimately completely different - we are not artists; we are architects. Artists physically manipulate the final piece, whereas as architects we filter ideas before we build, and the finish is drafted in drawings and models that get more and more detailed."

They suggest that the etymology of the word 'pavilion' has its roots in 'papillon', or butterfly. They describe pavilions as playing a catalytic role, but they were always looking for ways to use such projects as a route to achieve longer term objectives. Working on pavilions allowed them to explore approaches to form and material that would later underpin more substantial projects. And they helped them to become increasingly skilled at finding ways of using every new brief as an opportunity, allowing them to go beyond simply providing a commercial response. Carmody
Groarke compare the pavilions to the physical models that form an essential part of their working methods. 

"We work with large models: everyone can engage with a model as they are more democratic than drawings, which not everybody understands. Anyone can add a piece to change a model in a way that is not the case with a drawing. Pavilions are a model of a kind - a full size test."

Looking back, it is clear how their ideas have been tested and developed between one project and the next. The scalloped geometry that they used in their 

 on fashion illustration at the Design Museum, for example, informed the approach they took at the Filling Station, and later, a temporary centre for supporting cancer patients and their families. The materials that they deployed went from fragile paper to sturdy fibreglass - but each version learned from the same basic ideas about planning and geometry, about skin and structure. Similarly, Carmody Groarke's 

 on the shore at Lake Windermere, a cluster of sheds spilling out across the landscape, is a development of the DNA represented by the ideas of the
Studio East pavilion. When they won the competition to start work on 

, Mackintosh's domestic masterpiece, there was not the money to salvage the rain sodden structure. There was a suggestion that what might be needed was a visitor centre to accommodate a display and raise funds for restoration work. They came up with something that was much more radical, but also
more practical and respectful.

They proposed a scaffold, something like Cedric Price's aviary in London's zoo - as radical now it is being restored as it was in 1962 when it was built. Mackintosh's brilliant design was catastrophically ill equipped to keep the weather out. Its timber was rotting, threatening its exquisite interiors. There was neither the money nor a short-term strategy to fix it. Carmody Groarke's huge mesh cage would give temporary protection but would also provide a new way of looking close up at the exterior of Mackintosh's building – far more effective as an experience than an exhibition inside a visitor centre. It would "stop the clock, halt the decay, allow time to think". It was a brilliant insight, but one which also needed a careful technical solution to be realised appropriately. With the shock of two fires at Mackintosh's other great building, the Glasgow School of Art, there would be no risks taken at Hill House. There could be no naked flame of any kind on site - welding was excluded. At the same time, this new structure could not be a pragmatic piece of agricultural steel construction. The architects went to great pains to have the steelwork designed to be fabricated with only a primary structure and a subframe, without a secondary structure.

It's a project which, like so much of Carmody Groarke's work, is full of ideas with the potential to provide ample material for future developments. The structural clarity of the Hill House scaffold, in conjunction with the planning of their Windermere boat museum, points the way for what is one of their most interesting projects' boat-yard for a Hamburg ship builder. On one level, their plans to build a 

 on the edge of the river Elbe is an authentic piece of unselfconscious infrastructure. But they have absorbed the sensibility of the forensic photography of Hilla and Bernd Becher and their taxonomy of industrial objects, and their laconic design is informed by their own fascination with such architectural precedents as Peter Behrens' temple-like AEG factory and Albert Kahn's tank factory in Detroit.

In another era, Carmody Groarke's 15 years of practice would have been long enough to see a discernible shift in architectural attitudes. The gap between 2005 and 2021 represents the same distance that divided the world of 1955 and the Ham Common flats that James Stirling and James Gowan built in that year, from the very different sensibility of Stirling's Olivetti training centre of 1971. It is too soon to know quite how to interpret any signs of such stylistic differences in Carmody Groarke's development. 

But it is clear that their thinking has always been deeply affected by the climate emergency in ways that are becoming more and more apparent in their work. They have developed a determination not to demolish anything if they can avoid it, and to do as much as possible to address the issue of embedded carbon.

The experience of working on the most short-lived and potentially wasteful of all architectural projects - exhibition designs – which can see a £1m-build torn down and thrown in a skip after 12 weeks, helped to inform their work; not just as applied to exhibitions, but to larger scale buildings too. It's what drove their project for the Design Museum's 

 in 2017. They looked for an alternative to conventional plywood or plasterboard - standard means of creating temporary display walls. They found a proprietary material aimed for use in sound absorption in recording studios, based on recycled newspapers. It is pulped and sprayed in situ. Conventionally, the material is used to form an invisible coating. Carmody Groarke put it on show, using it to coat a framework to create a kind of free-form rock cave into which the exhibits were embedded. At the end of the exhibition, the material could be soaked in water, and pulped for reuse.

They are motivated by more than technique. Their transformation of the existing 

, a group of buildings clustered around an 18th century merchants house, is driven by a range of potentially conflicting impulses. Like their work at Studio East, and then at Windermere which treats each gallery as a room with a view so as to provide a sense of connection with its context. their design for Ghent opens the museum to the city around it by offering views to and from the galleries. Running through all of Carmody Groarke's work is a search for strong formal ideas that give visitors both a clear spatial experience and a tactile quality. They make buildings that are "touchable'. In the July 7 Memorial, it was the steel castings of the 52 stelae that commemorate each life lost. In Ghent, it will be the 

. Respecting the past, creating a new public face for an institution, and a zero carbon building are each as important as the other. One key issue that they tried to resolve was to find a low carbon alternative to traditional fired clay bricks. Their approach has been to use compressed chalk and crushed oyster shells for the mortar.

When the decision to uncouple the British Library from the British Museum was taken in the 1970s, it was fashionable to suggest that, since the book was all but dead as a means of information storage, there would be no point in building a new reading room. As a means of disseminating knowledge, a library - it was suggested - was as redundant as a scriptorium. As the crowds attracted to the British Library, moored like an aircraft carrier on the Euston Road demonstrate, the library is anything but dead. The constant building campaigns on the library's second site in Yorkshire over the last seven decades - a munitions factory during world war two - have struggled to keep up with the relentless tide of books that a copyright library must accommodate. A tide that is currently swallowing up eight kilometres of shelves every year.

 – large enough to cope with the expansion of the national collection for the next half-century - is part of a wider strategy for the site that will see a brutalist building from the 1970s refurbished to accommodate staff and visiting scholars. The Urquhart Building (named after the inventor of the document storage control and distribution system for the national collection) was originally designed by Brian Maud of the Department of the Environment. Remodelling, rather than demolishing it and designing a replacement, is a self-denying move. But they believe it is the right thing to do, in terms of conserving energy and resources, and also as a statement to represent the importance of continuity of its unusual context where everything else is in flux. They have had to argue their case at meetings of several hundred staff who see it as an unloved concrete dinosaur they want to get rid of.

The library project is a challenge that Carmody Groarke have relished: setting it as a brief for their students at Yale. It is a project that explores one of the most ancient building types; the library - as well as one of the newest; the Amazon warehouse with all its technologies, that has now taken the organisation and retrieval of storage out of human control. The books are kept safe by keeping them in a new generation of fully automated library archive buildings - an airtight container in which the oxygen required to fuel a fire is not present. As they put it to their class at Yale, this is what Rem Koolhaas suggests 'post human architecture' looks like.

But for Carmody Groarke, it is not a cause for striking self-dramatizing attitudes that such phrases encourage. It's for thinking about how such buildings can be made legible, how their responsibilities to the planet can be met, and what they are like to work in. Size is a concept that is continually being redefined in architectural practice. There was a time when 30 people was as big as most studios ever wanted to be. Now, some see 400 staff as the minimum necessary to equip them to take on the kind of projects that they believe define contemporary practice. And 1000 is not unknown. Yet for the Australian architect Glenn Murcutt, who insists on carrying out every aspect of architectural practice on his own, the risk of corruption starts in an office with two architects.

Carmody Groarke is a studio of around 35 people: a size once considered to constitute a medium sized, if not a large office. The intellectual origins of the debate about size and architecture began with Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Writing for the Architectural Review in 1947, he speculated about the future of architecture which, he suggested, was not going to be about modernism nor postmodernism, but about the way that architecture was made. In short, between what he called the architecture of bureaucracy and the architecture of genius and, though he never said it, between big offices, and small studios. Or between architects who design what the client asks for, and those who design what they themselves want to build. Sometimes this is presented as a conflict between the corporate, with all the negative connotations that the word brings, and the self-expression or authorship of the artist. But at other times, the tables are turned, and it is authorship, or self-expression in design, that is represented in negative terms, as a wilful self-indulgence.

"By bureaucratic architecture, I mean all building that is the product of large scale architectural organisations from which personal expression is absent," wrote Hitchcock. "As I have used the terms 'bureaucrat’ and ‘bureaucratic’ without the pejorative connotation which they have for many people, I should hasten to say that I use the word ‘genius’ merely to define the sort of architect who functions as a creative individual rather than as an anonymous member of a team. The term refers to a particular psychological approach and way of working, which may or may not produce masterpieces. The products of the ‘genius’ cannot be assessed from the sum of their particular amenities, in the way that one might compare one factory with another or one housing estate with another on a percentage basis. Their qualities depend on overall impact, just as the more intensely expressive forms of art, such as music or poetry or painting, do." 

Carmody Groarke, and offices like theirs, suggest that there is another alternative that sounds much like the traditional idea of the professional architectural practice - a profession that carries with it the sense of obligation to a client.

The issue for the architect is to develop a wider sense of who that client is. Carmody Groarke suggest that architecture has responsibilities at multiple levels - to the commissioning client who appoints them and formulates a brief, a programme and a budget, but also the end user, and society at large. They take delight in design with a sense of authenticity. "If you work as hard as you can for five decades, you might make 30 or 40 good buildings – if you are lucky." But how much influence do they have? "We talk to our students about working on the edges. It's where we can make the most difference and make the most contribution to the problem by being inside the game." What emerges from their work is a carefully measured and thoughtful approach. They know their history, and in doing so have a self-awareness that has given them pause to think not only about what they build but how they build it, and who they build it for, and why. 

As a young practice, we struggled with what to respond to at the tail end of an economic super boom. Now we have different concerns, we can do more than respond to the market, and shift to considering how we practice ethically.

About Carmody Groarke
Deyan Sudjic

Kevin Carmody spoke to students and faculty at RMIT University, Melbourne as part of their Brickworks series of talks in March 2018. His presentation explored the territory of architecture and the proposition that making architecture is a reconciliation between the room and the city, the inhabitant and the onlooker and the individual and the future generations. He explored a number of the studio's projects, including 

Brickworks
RMIT University

The house has long been a reflection of our time and place in the world. With increasing mobility and international travel, free movement through borders and even the creation of a European Union, society has become more ever more nomadic. With this social mobility, the population is increasingly relying on temporary accommodation for a large portion of their lives. More often this temporary accommodation is becoming a part of an individuals’ ‘home’ life.

Our studio at Stuttgart University focused on the design of an urban proposition based around a hotel for a city centre London site. The course began with a study of a private hotel room and had a strong emphasis on physical model-making to develop proposals which prioritise atmosphere and dwelling. The unit then focused on the ‘public’ areas of the hotel to understand the relationship with its users, public spaces surrounding the proposal and strategic urban relevance.

'A place for living away from home’
Stuttgart University

The Steindamm Ensemble is located in the diverse and fast growing area of Hamburg’s St Georg district. Fronting the Steindamm Magistrale, one of the major arterial routes leading into the city centre. Although it is a distinct and prominent city figure within its local context, the existing building performs poorly in space and environmental standards.

The redevelopment begins with the premise of retaining as much of the existing tower structure as possible and adding further area at each level and more storeys on top. Without loading the existing concrete frame any further, a new steel exo-skeleton will be erected around the tower’s perimeter, creating an environmental crust (brise soleil and a higher-performing building envelope), a permanent scaffolding structure to hang the new floors from and a new building image. The additional area will also provide a series of double height winter garden spaces at each gable for break-out and views to the city centre.

At ground level a new three-storey plinth connects the tower with a stronger, formal relationship to the surrounding urban grain. These lower parts of the building will contain a mixture of active commercial uses facing the Magistrale, with community and residential uses on the perpendicular cross streets.

Steindamm Ensemble 

A new duplex apartment at the top of a late Victorian merchant’s building in the centre of Covent Garden takes advantage of magnificent panoramic views over the roofscape of West London.

The project restores the Grade II Listed building and creates generous connections between levels and light, airy rooms designed around a young family’s pattern of living. Bedrooms are planned at the lower level with living and social areas above. The larger scaled, more characterful loft spaces are designed to be more open-plan and are better connected to external terraces and a new cast iron and glass winter-garden pavilion.

Covent Garden House 

The University of Leeds (UoL) has one of the largest research libraries in the UK with over 81km of bound material for teaching and research, special collections, and institutional records. The collection is anticipated to grow by 50km over the next 60 years, as it does their existing storage is running out of space. Further compounding this challenge much of their existing storage space is inappropriate, of poor quality, or held in buildings that may be better utilised for study space or other activities.

Together with a team of quantity surveyors, business planners, and environmental consultants we have developed a series of architecturally led options to address this challenge. These include evaluating the possibility to develop a new storage facility on campus, through the refurbishment of existing buildings, and evaluating the option to develop a new purpose-built facility on the outskirts of the city. A high-level cost analysis has been developed for each option, outlining both the capital investment and operational costs associated with the proposed facility. Life-cycle carbon emissions forecasting has been undertaken to ensure alignment with the University's wider environmental strategy and providing a holistic analysis into the viability of each option.

University of Leeds Archive Building 

For Wallpaper, Ellie Stathaki documents the approach to redesigning internationally-acclaimed artist Julian Opie's 

 and the practice's long-spanning history of transforming existing spaces for art and architecture.

Julian Opie Studio
Wallpaper*

Read more about our work with the British Library to build a new low-energy, passive 

 to store their growing collection of prints, books and manuscripts. 

A bigger home for the British Library
BBC 



, designed and built for the White Cube Gallery set within the historic grounds of Glyndebourne. 

White Cube Gallery 
Dezeen 

 features in Domus upon the opening of the project in Autumn 2017. 

V&A Member's Room
Domus 

The option studio at Cornell AAP Department of Architecture explored the rapidly changing relationship we have with the production, consumption and representation of food within the city and society as a whole. Just like the paintings of the Golden Age of Dutch Still Life painting became more an aspirational representation of a lifestyle rather than what one might eat and drink everyday (as the boastful Instagram shot of a restaurant meal may do today), our relationship with both the origins and also the enjoyment of food has become abstracted and mediated.

The project considered architectural practice in a way that connects specific and vivid experiences and memories of food to the design of objects, rooms and buildings. The studio took the partially ruined structures of Smithfield Meat Market, one of London’s most historically important and prosperous food markets, although now subject to severe economical and physical decline, as the nexus of research. 

The studio developed site specific proposals for fitting new architectural form and purpose into an evolving physical, historical and societal situation. Each project uncovered alternative futures to the current redevelopment of the meat market into a Museum of London, in a way that instead reconnects this city centre site to the experience and enjoyment of the production, distribution and consumption of food once again.

The project prioritised the making and recording of physical models at various scales to develop the formal (urban and architectural), spatial, constructive and atmospheric ideas about architecture. The project was structured with three exercises to format the semester (two individual and one groupwork).

'Market Forces'
Cornell AAP

The studio focused on the fragile and fundamental relationship between architecture and landscape over time in the design of a new long-term 

 for the British Library in the picturesque English countryside. Although on face-value, the task was to design a simple “box” in the landscape, the studio examined the implications of architecture’s physical presence at a sublime scale, as well as the resilience and long-term continuity of institutions and their buildings.

Our students were expected to act as long-distance detectives for a site they were never able to visit this semester and react with imagination to a brief for a project intended to last 300 years, amidst a global pandemic in which no-one could plan further than a week ahead.

The semester was structured in a series of inter-linked individual and group work projects. Extensive research of both ‘high’ and ‘low’ architectural precedents, documented in large scale physical models and detailed drawings along with intensive design charrettes formed the basis of each student’s main project thesis. These exercises were complemented by seminars given by world-renowned artists, academics and practitioners on diverse topics including: the sublime scale of distribution architecture; the fascination of the ‘ruin’ in picturesque and post-industrial landscapes; the typology of the ‘noble-shed’; and speculations on the future preservation and distribution of our physical knowledge.

The complex brief and wide scope of research triggered the students to engage with projects in diverse ways to develop not only orthodox architectural proposals, masterplans and landscape interventions, but also highly-imaginative economic, political and social frameworks which could perhaps cross-fertilise and fortify the future cultural life of the library campus in perpetuity.

It was heartening to see that a sincere interest in ecological and social sustainability underpinned the values of all ten final projects. And yet each one envisioned the long-term future of the institution and its architecture from a highly personal intuitive perspective. And with hope and optimism for 300 years ahead.

'Not Forever'
Yale School of Architecture 

Waddesdon Manor was built in 1874 as a French Renaissance-style chateau by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to entertain and house his collection of fine art. The Manor sits within the grounds of Waddesdon Estate, a vast, man-made park landscape, punctuated by several ornamental architectural structures used for cultural attractions. Waddesdon Manor Estate constitutes one of the most popular stately home visitor attractions in the United Kingdom.

The pavilion’s architectural identity is confirmed by a large, elemental steel canopy, generated from its primary purpose of providing shelter within the park landscape. This form introduces a horizontal landmark quality when seen from all points of approach and creates a generous outdoor undercover space beneath framing views outwards to the Estate and Manor. In contrast to the canopy’s dark cantilevering form, a white-frosted glass and polycarbonate room is sheltered beneath, containing all of the visitor facilities.

Waddesdon Manor Pavilion 

The centre forms a landmark of a tower-like “house” emerging from the forest canopy. The building is expressed as an entirely timber structure, using innovative and modern timber building technologies that reference the vernacular building crafts of the area.

Within the close proximity of the building, the “house” has a scaleless quality rising above the tree tops. This is a building that is intended to complement the forest in its form and materials. As a tower, it asserts a minimum footprint in the forest floor ecosystem. Its unusual stepped figure is given scale and a purposeful connection between inside and outside with large windows to view the trees at various levels.

The building is organised with light-filled gallery spaces at the top, and lecture theatre and education spaces with direct external connection located near to the forest floor. The entrance to the visitor centre at the middle floor of the tower is imagined as a “skywalk”, which passes through some of the finest trees above the forest floor. The slender bridge structure touches the ground delicately and is deliberately non-linear in its path so visitors can experience the trees at all levels and in close proximity.

Black Forest Visitor Centre

David Chipperfield: British architects of my generation, and even the following one, had to find opportunities abroad to build up a portfolio when we started. I wonder whether that has really changed for your generation? My sense is that the UK is still a difficult place to establish an architectural practice.

Andy Groarke: Our generation set up just before the global recession. At that point there were plenty of opportunities in the UK and in London. There were competitions, but these were mainly overseas. That all changed after the recession. So we had to equip ourselves with very unusual tactics to get work and to make work. We made some very unusual projects through that period, borne out of unusual circumstances, which are arguably on the margins of conventional architecture, including for example memorials, exhibitions and temporary projects.

DC: Do you think it would have made a difference if you had started at a different time?

Kevin Carmody: I think so. The hubris of development in London during the late stages of the economic super-boom went largely unquestioned by developers, and architects. I would say young practices such as ours found it relatively easy to get a particular type of work at that time; I think most of our projects then were for high-end fit-outs and things like that. They were small projects which we enjoyed immensely at the time and they helped us develop a confidence in our craft, but they didn't tend to lead to any further opportunities to make public or civic projects.

DC: That's what I mean. Small private jobs have always been there. The question is how do you get larger or civic commissions, if that’s where your interests lie?

KC: We realised that you need to employ a multiplicity of strategies and tactics in order to make work.

DC: Yes, but what interests me is how else do architectural practices start out in this country, because you cannot rely entirely on the competition process.

AG: We agree. Just after the recession we were fortunate enough to be able to work on some collaborations with artists and the art world. The influence of the art world has certainly changed over our generation and I think we benefitted from that. There's a certain like-mindedness between 'client' and architect.

KC: We found a certain expediency – a common language in the experience of things and spaces.

DC: And there is a bit of mutual respect, as you are working in the applied arts.

Grossmarkt Theatre Pavilion

BFI Southbank

Retain, Reuse, ReinventCambridge University