Materials longevity, craft and innovation are the driving forces for Carmody Groarke, which lead it to collaborate with specialists outside the usual range for architects
Hargreaves Foundry
We’ve tried to show a range of collaborations that demonstrate our interest in both innovation and the craft and lifespan of materials, from the very hands-on to the very strategic.
We couldn’t have made the Tavistock Square memorial without the expertise of Hargreaves Foundry, a 150-year old cast iron specialist based in Halifax. We’d already designed the memorial in London’s Hyde Park to the 7 July bombings of 2005 when we were commissioned to design another one, to the bus bombing in Tavistock Square. This was very different – a local memorial in the only place you can locate above ground of all the bombings that happened that day.
We felt that a modest, rather unassuming formal presence was appropriate for something you’d chance upon in the square. Low-lying but substantial, the double-curved tablet measures 2.7m wide by 4.7m long, and is cast with an epitaph and the names of the innocent victims who died at the square that day, in lettering by the late typographer and long-standing collaborator Phil Baines.
We wanted the memorial to draw attention in a site-specific way – in summer, the gap in the trees and foliage above the memorial frames a view to the site of where the bomb went off, and we have taken out one of the Georgian kerbstones where the memorial abuts the pavement, as a reminder that there’s been an interruption in the continuity of the place. The curved tablet links the public pavement with the park path in the square.
When we had finalised the design, we went to many foundries including Hargreaves, which not only has a long history of producing architectural metalwork, but also works with fine artists such as Antony Gormley. It was the only foundry confident enough and technically equipped to do the 6.5tonne casting in one pour of pig iron, a material choice that made sense in the tradition of street furniture such as manhole covers and drainage grills.
We were really testing the limits of the material, and Hargreaves, which does its own tooling and mould-making, was unbelievably hands-on. It collaborated with us and Professor Baines, CNC tooling the letter forms into the mould in depths ranging from 15-40mm, and helping us to understand how the ingot could be cast as a single piece.
The casting was completely elemental. Hargreaves dug into the factory floor, rested the entire mould in it and filled it completely with sand. Then the pig iron was poured from a single cauldron in just a few minutes. It’s a real art.
After it was cast, Hargreaves carried out detailed reparations before the memorial was allowed to pre-weather outside for months in the foundry yard – fully rusting before being coated with a protective rust converter solution to give it its dark brown oxidised patina. This gives a wonderful adamantine effect, as if it’s been dug up archeologically.
Completed in 2018, the memorial’s purpose is to endure as a reminder of the significant interruption that happened to the order of society in 2005. It also serves as a reminder to us to work with artisans who aren’t part of the conventional building process. As a studio, part of our philosophy is to stay as close as possible to the crafting of projects through their materials and test materials and processes that have been forgotten. In this way, through collaborations such as our work with Hargreaves, we can make things with materials, rather than making things with components and products.
Local Works Studio
Ben and Loretta Bosence of Local Works Studio are material specialists based near Lewes in East Sussex, focusing on the creative and sustainable use of resources. They have backgrounds in building conservation and landscape architecture, and we recently collaborated on the Gent Waste Brick, developed for the new Design Museum Gent building.
Gent has the oldest design museum in Belgium, housed in a collection of historic buildings. Along with our partner architects ATAMA and RE-ST, our team won an international design competition to develop a gap site to link all the buildings, providing much-needed visitor facilities and accessible circulation for the first time.
Initially, our instinct was to make it a white brick building in reference to the local white limestone. Covid then stalled the project for two years, which gave us the opportunity to slow down and think about other opportunities for the project.
Together with our brilliant clients – Sogent and Design Museum Gent – we wanted to showcase how the design of the museum could meet the challenges of our contemporary times, not least the climate crisis. So we changed to a timber structure instead of concrete. We also thought that there must be a better way of making bricks that would decarbonise the manufacturing process. The team secured a research grant from Circular Flanders to develop a low carbon alternative to traditional clay fired bricks, which uses hyper-local waste materials from the city of Gent with lime as the primary binder, and cures in atmospheric C02, effectively sequestering carbon over the life of the building.
We then began our collaboration with Local Works Studio, which provoked us to work with what was to hand, and was completely sympathetic to using local waste streams in the recipe as aggregate. It guided us towards recommended materials such as pulverised waste concrete, industrial glass, and porcelain from toilets. We’d go down to the firm's farm in East Sussex and people would be concocting mixes in giant buckets – at one point they were looking at using discarded mussel and oyster shells from Gent restaurants for the hydraulic lime component. They also imported a big container of Gent earth to work with, as it was necessary to make a recipe with local materials – the research process took months and months.
The eventual recipe went to BC Materials, which developed the research further, navigated the complex regulatory framework for use on a public building, industrialised the process and has now produced the 100,000 bricks needed for the museum building. These will start to go up later this year. Made from 65% waste, they have approximately one third of the embodied carbon of a typical clay fired brick.
Throughout the brick development process, Ben has been a critical friend. He’s shown us that we need not default to specifying materials that have their origins in times of abundancy. Instead, he’s drawn our attention to the idea that there are ways of making materials to create a new vernacular – moving away from materials which are engineered to out-perform universally in any context – and, in doing so, reduce embodied carbon
We’ve started to collaborate with Ben and Loretta on other projects including a forensic demolition at London Wall, in which elements of the existing building fabric suitable for reuse are identified, meticulously catalogued and creatively incorporated into the new design.
Harry Montrésor/Montrésor Partnership
I first met facade engineer Harry Montrésor when I was at Haworth Tompkins in 2000/01. We’ve since worked on lots of projects together to develop projects with unique cladding solutions, including the Windermere Jetty Museum, and state of the art passive archives for the British Library at Boston Spa and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Amiens.
With rising environmental imperatives, buildings are expected to perform to increasingly high standards, as are their components. Harry’s role is to understand the performance of the building by linking the individual components of its construction to create a coherent whole. He’s an architect by training, and has a mind that can turn the project over and look at the construction from different directions. What’s so special is that working with him is like having a professor of building physics and a professor of building history sitting simultaneously beside you in the collaboration. He draws the most wonderful explanatory drawings showing how building components are subject to forces both seen and unseen, often drawing at 1:1.
For Windermere, we designed a building sheathed in copper to give a sculptural presence that will patinate to show the passage of time, and register the marks of the maker. The copper is only 0.6mm thick, but has the appearance of something very substantial and long-lasting.
With Harry, we built a working mock-up on the site and watched how the copper patinated over the course of a year. In this way, we could see how it responded to wider environmental conditions and pollution such as crop-dusting before revising the detailing. Harry helped us to craft these details and create specifications for the contractors.
While Windermere Jetty Museum facade was designed to record the passage of time through a process of gradual patination and colouring, the British Library archive project is extremely airtight and hermetic, and is designed to keep its pristine Day One finish. Meanwhile at Gent, the recycled aggregate bricks give the idea of the building having a circular, reincarnation approach to time.
Elemental Solutions
As projects increase in scale, complexity and performance, we are called upon to co-ordinate the expertise of many specialists. Elemental Solutions is a Passivhaus consultant and passive archive specialist. We’re collaborating on the British Library’s new automated storage building in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, to create a high-density, low-energy airtight envelope to protect the national collection of books, newspapers and more.
Nick Grant and Alan Clarke from Elemental have helped us with the design development, proof of concept, and as an extra pair of eyes on the quality of the workmanship.
Around 75% of the British Library’s collection is stored in Boston Spa on a site that was originally a munitions factory. The first storage building opened in 1972. We’re designing a new building comprising a Logistics Hub and storage void with 225km linear storage capacity and a state-of-the-art retrieval system that uses logistics fulfilment technology. The void is the size of a football pitch on plan and is eight storeys high.
Fire, temperature and humidity are the three key factors to deal with. First, we’ll neutralise the risk of fire by deoxygenating the air to 15% oxygen, below the risk of a fire taking hold. Then, we’ll make it airtight, and use the thermal mass and moisture content of the collection to stabilise the building’s own climate.
As there will never be a need for HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) – there will just be the nitrogen-machine going – we expect the storage building to use only a small fraction of the operational energy of typical archives despite the reduced oxygen environment.
Alongside Elemental, Buro Happold has been integral to the development of the overall passive house strategy, helping us to deliver a creative and highly ambitious design approach and pushing the project from an early stage.
While Elemental Solutions’ consultancy is based on environmental modelling, it is hands-on about pairing concepts with physical tests and homemade mockups, even for a project at the scale of the archive building and for an institutional client. It made all sorts of practical experiments with tin cans and tape as part of the design development of the airtightness system. This interest in the innovation and craft of materials influences our thinking on a strategic level, and is one of the reasons we have enjoyed working with the firm.
The outcome is a system of lightweight steel-faced, insulated panels sealed with high performance tape. The aim is to make it much more airtight than Passivhaus to ensure the most efficient encapsulation of the low oxygen fire-prevention environment.
The construction of the storage building, including the installation of the automation systems, is due to be completed in late 2025. Once operational, a new viewing gallery within the building will allow people to see behind the scenes and the automated archive in action.
Andy Groarke is a director and co-founder of Carmody Groarke
As told to Pamela Buxton