A sculptor and a Portuguese supplier of structural stone are among the favourite collaborators named by the founding director of Eric Parry Architects
LSI is a Portuguese-based stone contractor. We’ve worked with them on three projects and they’ve kind of grown up with us over the years.
LSI was established 25 years ago and is led by a formidable lady called Regina Vitório. She’s incredible; always excited by the next challenge I come up with. I’ve watched them develop over at least 15 years. They run a very sustainable operation in terms of recycling – the way they use water, and their use of solar energy.
We’d started working with self-supporting stone earlier at Pembroke College Cambridge, for which I visited 25 quarries and mines. But I had not used Portuguese stone until we worked with LSI on 7 & 8 St James Square, London, where they did such a brilliant job. The structural use of stone followed Pembroke at Finsbury Square and was preceded at the Southwark Needle at London Bridge.
7-8 St James Square replaced a 1939 building and follows the original footprint of domestic buildings on the square. It has a granite base and large limestone elements above. For this, I wanted very big reveal depths and lintels. Portland couldn’t provide that scaling so we worked with Portuguese stone, using Cabeça Veada limestone from LSI.
LSI didn’t have the machinery to work with granite at that time but soon afterwards, they invested in machinery to do so. By the time we worked with them at Chelsea Barracks, where they supplied both the granite column bases and beautiful Cabeça Veada limestone facade, they were also able to work with us on the idea of lettering in architecture, using CNC-cutting of lettering at an extensive scale as a frieze on one of the three buildings.
Although the project coincided with Covid, they were able to keep going and the quality and scaling of the stone are wonderful.
Now we’re collaborating with them on the new City of London Law Court building, a part of the Salisbury Square Justice Quarter development on Fleet Street. Here, the exterior of the building is essentially a self-supporting limestone carapace. It has to be very robust, a protective shell for those within and without at a civic scale.
We started on the project in 2017 and we’re now at the mock-up stage. LSI is also supplying the base – an Angolan Gabro stone that has been scrutinised very carefully in terms of its procurement methodology. At street level, we’re integrating an ambitious artwork by Shirazeh Houshiary of 10 panels using the same base material.
We worked with Severfield on the metalwork for 4 Pancras Square at King’s Cross. The project began back in 2003 when there was a charrette run by the developer, Argent. With the carrot of a project in the masterplan, we were given three weeks to come up with an idea pro bono.
The trapezoidal site had a sense of the industrial, with the raw exoskeleton of the gasholders and solidity of the warehouses in the background. I started to dream about something that would be expressive of the future but resonate with the past.
I wanted to liberate the ground and for the public realm to flow underneath. I talked to Albert Williamson-Taylor of engineer AKT II, a close friend who I’ve known throughout 35 years of practice and then, during the charette, we came up with a Vierendeel structure as a supporting belt which takes the weight of the building above. That was pretty much where the design began. This opening stretches 27m. Argent wanted a single column at the centre, but I eventually convinced them not to have it.
It was wonderful to think about the metal with Severfield. The idea was to build an external frame that would structurally support the building within and would have something of that gasometer scaling. The frame was created in plates of Cor-ten weathering steel, with the vertical elements filled with concrete to give the necessary fire resistance. The structure has a strong haptic quality, particularly in the wonderful splicing plates with the rivet bolt heads.
The weathering steel was put together at Severfield’s Bolton works and was rather like the scale of bridge-building. It was a great joy to visit to see the remarkable crafting, as it was welded before being transported to site.
Weathering steel is really absorbent of light, and changes over time as it forms its protective crust. It gets better with age, with a unifying absorbent quality of deep richness.
It fills me with pleasure to see that it was built like my original drawing, with light reflected off the white terracotta brise-soleil. In Kenneth Frampton’s opinion, it’s the best office building to be built since The Economist, which as a former student of his, I appreciate very much.
We’re now working with Severfield on the City of London Police headquarters at Salisbury Square.
I always corresponded with Jon Wilson at Shaws of Darwen, which was an important maker, and then in its reincarnation as Darwen Terracotta. The interesting thing about working with ceramics is that it’s all to do with artifice, as the product is essentially a human construct and very open, whereas working with stone is about taking something off the geological shelf, so to speak.
We first worked with Shaws of Darwen on the extension of the Grade-I-listed Holburne Museum in Bath, which finally finished in 2011. This has an extraordinary context. The museum building had previously been a bordello/casino at the entrance to a pleasure garden on an axis with Great Pulteney Street, before Reginald Blomfield turned it into a museum for William Holburne’s collection in 1916. These changes turned the museum’s back on the gardens, which have survived. My response was to look at how you could reconnect with the gardens by moving Blomfield’s staircase to enable the connection to the gardens again.
As rebuilt in 1916, on the top level of the building, Blomfield created a well-proportioned gallery with top light and no windows. In the extension, the director Xa Sturgis wanted to have an equivalent temporary exhibition space at this level with solid walls and no windows, and that’s quite an interesting problem. I wanted to create a sense of mystery and joy in the garden, and I started to think about materials that I’d be happy to float, such as ceramics.
At the bottom, we have a garden room, encased in glass, then ceramic and glass for the middle section where we housed the permanent collection, concluding with ceramic walls for the temporary exhibition space at the top.
A challenging thing about ceramic is your choice of glaze. We developed the glazes with Jon and others. I had the idea of the glaze being like an iris, then it morphed into what we wanted from what was effectively a mistake from a sample with an overglaze produced by a defective spray nozzle.
After a lot of work, we ended up with a two-layered glaze: an underglaze, which is manganese, and a stipple, which is titanium-based. Ceramics are always prone to mistakes and glaze failure. At one point the glaze was wrong and they lost two months of production.
It was not easy to persuade the good citizens of Bath that ceramics were a good idea. The planning application eventually went through, helped by a wonderful group of advisers on the design review panel, and we got it to site 10 years after the project started.
The great thing about the glaze is it reflects the trees around it, so becomes kinetic and has this mysterious quality of floating within the garden.
We worked with Darwen again at One Eagle Place at Piccadilly, where we integrated a ceramic cornice artwork by artist Richard Deacon – a magnificent chromatic expression of his ideas. It would have taken an inordinate amount of time to studio-paint the surfaces, so we found a way of doing it with transfers. It was really difficult to get the colour translations right. Colour testing was done in Stoke and had to be coordinated with the industrially scaled kilns at Shaws of Darwen. The result has a very strong character – intentionally so – within the context.
Stephen Cox is an amazing sculptor who mainly works in stone from India, Egypt and Italy. I first got to know his work in 1991, when I was designing a building at Stockley Park. I went to the inauguration of his sculpture Osirisisis there and was particularly struck by the powerful way he worked with stone. His sculptures have a figurative resonance and I remember very vividly a set of oval faces – four of the senses, each anointed with oil. That libation is very much what one finds in India as part of purification rites and the animation of material. His work in terms of both shaping stone and allowing it to be marked by fluids was something I found very poignant, having visited and researched in India a few years earlier with my graduate students.
His work is deeply rooted in the cultural context from which the stones emerged, and that empathy for cultural context delighted and intrigued me. As I think about how to use and finish stone myself, his use of the material, and the range of possibilities these stones open up, has been a continuous learning process for me. Exploring both the earthly, chthonic sense of the buried stone, and its miraculous metamorphosis is ever intriguing.
The first joint project we created was a beautiful balustrade he made for me at the Chateau de Paulin in France. We have worked on several projects since, including the spa at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in London, where he designed a whole set of body figures. The spa was naturally detailed around ideas of purification and inundation, which is what you find in the sacred tanks of India.
At One Eagle Place, he created a rather wonderful head on the corner of Jermyn Street that reflects both orientation and bodily presence
I have definitely learnt a lot directly from Stephen for our use of stone. At 7 & 8 St James Square, the protuberant base to the first-floor loggia is in large monolithic blocks of granite that go from grey to a very reflective black where it is honed and polished around the window frames. I was also responsible for suggesting him for an artwork on the project – a relief called Figure Emerging – and also basalt slabs and inscriptions referencing Edwin Lutyens, one of whose offices was at the rear of the site when he was designing New Delhi.
Stone is a material of infinite marvels. Stephen opens up a world of stone to me that wouldn’t otherwise be available, because that’s what he spends his entire life exploring.
Learning about the geological time involved in these stones is a wonderous musing that continues to resonate with me. At the City of London Law Courts, we’re currently exploring different finishes for the great lintels of stone we’re using there.
I’ve been to many openings and installations of Stephen’s work, including pieces at Waddesdon Manor and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. There’s always a sense of celebration, which is something I don’t think we spare the time for enough as we hurtle through life. To be able to celebrate moments in the natural passage of making buildings is very important too. There’s a very important collective social aspect to it and we enjoy our celebrations, which we have repeated over the years.
Eric Parry is the founding director of Eric Parry Architects
As told to Pamela Buxton