Caruso St John: the architect duo behind London's top galleries w Vauxhall space | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening

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30/03/2016 17:07

Lifestyle Design

Caruso St John: the architect duo behind London's top galleries

including Damien Hirst's new Vauxhall space
After 25 years in practice together, Adam Caruso and Peter St John have become the architects of choice for the capitals top
galleries including Damien Hirsts handsome new space in Vauxhall
ROBERT BEVAN | Tuesday 29 September 2015 |

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On the same wavelength: Adam Caruso and Peter St John at Damien Hirsts Newport Street Gallery Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd

After a quarter of a century of work it is the fate of many

architectural practices to accept that they will be building
house extensions for the remainder of their existence, or that
they have morphed into commercial design factories
churning out ever more bland or expedient buildings to feed
the hungry payroll monster.

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Caruso St John: the architect duo behind London's top galleries w Vauxhall space | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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Not so Caruso St John. Set up in 1990 and coming to national

prominence early on with its spectacular competition-winning
New Art Gallery in Walsall, the practice has determinedly limited
its own size and, unusually, much of its work still comes from
entering (and winning) architectural competitions.
Its 25th anniversary is perfectly timed with a trio of projects that
illustrate the calibre of arts schemes with which it has become
associated Damien Hirsts Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall,
which opens next Thursday; the latest space in Mayfair for worldleading art dealer Larry Gagosian; and a scheme to freshen up and
extend the Liverpool Philharmonic, the citys magnificent Art Deco
concert hall.

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The Newport Street Gallery has been kept closely under wraps but
there are reports of serene gallery spaces and exquisitely crafted
staircases ( just look at the practices glamourpuss spiralling
number for Tate Britain in monochrome scallop-patterned
terrazzo).
Canadian-born Adam Caruso, 53, met Englishman Peter St John, 59,
after they both worked with architects Florian Beigel and Arup
Associates, and the pair discovered a mutual interest in Sixties and
Seventies conceptual artists and the YBAs of the early Nineties
very much their emerging contemporaries.

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Caruso St John: the architect duo behind London's top galleries w Vauxhall space | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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Old meets new: Caruso St Johns Stirling Prize-shortlisted Brick House in

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They were also inspired by a love of a London that, back then, still
had swathes of dereliction. It was a melancholy, everyday beauty
caught on film by artist Richard Wentworth and in Patrick Kiellers
1994 movie, London, before the financial deregulation of the 1986
Big Bang began to turn the city upside down.
There was a lot of space, recalls Caruso, and you could
romanticise that dereliction. London was still full of promise. Now,
even here in Bethnal Green where we work, that potential has been
used up there is so much over-development. The point isnt to
wish for dereliction but to be only too aware of what might have
been
That hasnt stopped the pair building a clutch of beguiling, subtle
projects in the capital. Among them the Stirling Prize-shortlisted
Brick House that is like a contemporary grotto in a landlocked west
London site; the remodelling of the Museum of Childhood; carving
out exhibition spaces from within the full-to-bursting Sir John
Soanes Museum; and a new caf next to 18th-century Chiswick
House the influential building that helped the work of 16thcentury Italian architect Antonio Palladio become the English
national style for the next two centuries.

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Caruso St John: the architect duo behind London's top galleries w Vauxhall space | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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New staircase for the Newport Street Gallery

Caruso St Johns work, which avoids a signature look, is the

antithesis of the shouty one-liner architecture that has come to
dominate the London skyline. A building might include decorative
tiles, deep, expressive brick arches inspired by the northern
European Renaissance, or splendid concrete beams that recall the
timber versions found in old English country houses.
Their successful strategy has been to reference history, conjure
emotion and capture the intellectual content of conceptual art to
produce buildings that are unmistakably contemporary in spirit.
At the outset, Caruso St John appeared to be part of a group of
architectural practices nicknamed The Whisperers for both their
quiet and intense buildings and similar conversational style. But as
soon as Walsall was finished people realised that our work was
rich, says Caruso. We arent interested in the monastic. Our work
at Tate Britain is opulent. [Former director] Penelope Curtis said it
reminded her of Art Deco at first I was oended but she is right.

READ MORE
Damien Hirsts new gallery opens with abstract great John Hoyland
London's Nine Elms is one of Europe's biggest regeneration zones:

London, he says, has an amazing inter-war heritage of architecture

that is not quite Deco and not quite Modernist but superbly fresh.
Charles Holdens Senate House and the Bermondsey church by
Goodhart-Rendel are cases in point.
Whatever the budget we are interested in richness, continues
Caruso. Zaha Hadid may use one shape to form the whole of an
enormous building. That doesnt feel like richness at all it feels
poor.
Instead, the Newport Street Gallery promises a subtle luxury when
it opens to display Hirsts personal collection of 3,000 works by
leading contemporary artists, beginning with its inaugural John
Hoyland exhibition (reviewed on this page).
Three listed Edwardian factories that were once used to create
theatre sets have been combined to create lofty white spaces
perfectly judged and lit (Caruso St John often use full-size mock-ups
to get the atmosphere of an interior just right). These are bookended by a pair of sympathetic new buildings that form a sheer
wall of red brick to the railway viaduct leading into Waterloo
station. Inside, lusciously curvaceous staircases are finished in
white-glazed brick.
Caruso St Johns buildings may each look dierent but thats partly
because they respond to their situation. The architects walked
Londons streets endlessly and learned the importance of
interpreting the locality, whether it is neighbouring structures or
the economic and cultural character of the area.

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Caruso St John: the architect duo behind London's top galleries w Vauxhall space | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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This might sound obvious but in an age of globalised design it is no

longer taken for granted as a starting point: Nowadays, it has
almost become a critical position, observes Caruso.
Detractors of the practice might say they have given themselves an
easy life by picking and choosing cultured clients with deep
pockets rather than having to deal with hard-nosed property
developers and volume housebuilders. But this ignores the fact
that they are designing bank headquarters, apartment blocks and
substantial business institutions across Europe from Zurich
(where they teach and have a second small oce), to Germany,
Belgium and France. So why arent they being commissioned for
such commercial projects in London?
Theres no mystery, says Caruso. In Flanders, Switzerland and
Germany any proposal of a scale that will aect the public realm
must have an architectural competition and there will be a strong,
ocial city architect in place. Often only three practices are invited
on a list drawn up by the city with the developer. And these are
commercial projects, private projects. We are on these peoples
radar but that doesnt happen here.
It is also a more ecient, linear and certain way of building quality
into a city. The developer gets what they want and the city
guarantees that the developer will get planning permission. Then
they go for it. If the design is crazy then you wont win the
competition.
If such an approach were adopted in London it would help to limit
the shoddy standard of much new architecture especially mass
housing. But Caruso is gloomy about the prospect given the muscle
of the free market, joking that instead that the practices 25th
birthday may mark the point when Caruso St John joins Zaha
Hadid (the Olympic pool), Renzo Piano (the Shard) and Rafael
Vinoly (the Walkie-Talkie) and learns to love the somewhat random
computer-generated curves of parametric design.
Fortunately theres no chance of that because theres a quiet but
fierce determination to Caruso St John. They know their work is
exceptional. Few practices over the past quarter century have
equalled them.
Newport Street Gallery, SE11 (020 3141 9320, newportstreet
gallery.com) opens on October 8; Palladian Design: the Good, the
Bad and the Unexpected, an exhibition designed by Caruso St John,
is at Riba, Portland Place, W1 (020 7580 5533, architecture.com)
until Jan 9; Caruso St John lecture at Riba on November 17
More about: | Architects | Caruso St John | Damien Hirst | Art Galleries

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