Patrick Lynch collaborates with artists and artisans and long-standing mentor Peter Carl to achieve designs made more joyful by stained glass, etched stone and imaginative landscapes
We’ve just finished a project with the glass artist Brian Clarke at Westminster Coroner’s Court. This court often deals with very high-profile cases, such as Grenfell Tower and celebrities, and so attracts the long-range lens of paparazzi. As there’s a lot of scrutiny, it’s important that the coroner can’t be lip-read from outside. Serendipitously, two of my former students have gone on to work with Brian Clarke, and they suggested I talk to him for this project, which includes stained glass for a series of rooms as you move through the building – including the court, the waiting room and a glass link between the original and new building.
Our view is that when you work with brilliant people, you have to let them do their thing. We had many conversations about the project with Brian, who had personal knowledge of Westminster Coroner’s Court. Brian is very experienced, very talented and amazingly down to earth, and we talked a lot about the painful experience of attending the court.
We learned a lot from him about how the stained glass is made – layers of colour are bonded together and then etched away to create marks that look like ripples. It’s not a homogenously textured surface, but is a building material, like stone or timber.
Brian’s designs are very precisely attuned to the user experience. The imagery is oblique and exhilarating – often incredibly beautiful daffodils. These form yellow reflections that work well with the static environment of the architecture. We were originally going to have more colour in the interiors, but we eliminated that and went for more neutral tones so that the interiors could be more of a background to Brian’s work.
In the courtroom, Brian’s beautiful stained glass obstructs views into the court, but also projects the most brilliant transillumination of moving light as it bounces off the pool outside the court. In the afternoon, when the coroner is going through their verdict and the light is coming in through the stained glass, it makes a memorable moment even more memorable.
We also worked with Brian on the room where bodies are formally identified. He designed some very beautiful green ceramic tiles that sit behind where the body is viewed, to create a more noble, dignified backdrop.
Too often, these sensitive spaces are institutionalised and banal. The stained glass helps give the important sense that people have really cared about the design.
Szerelmey is a national stone expert. It did the stone cladding on our Kings Gate residential project for Land Securities at Victoria in central London, and is a very interesting company – it not only sources the stone, but its draughtspeople draw all the stone details, and then it builds it.
When we first started with the firm at King’s Gate, we wanted stone but knew we couldn’t afford Portland Stone. They took me to the big stone show in Verona, and it was the most glorious experience. Szerelmey took me into the mountains on a sort of blind date with Wolfram Glaudo, who is like some sort of stone whisperer. Over a 12-course meal, he told me that stone is rather like pasta in that you can’t just choose any pasta for the sauce, you have to respect what the stone wants to be. I told him I wanted stone that was like a human hand – with veins. He said he’d take me to Bed 11 of a particular Jura quarry where iron deposits in the stone had oxidised and created colour. We went there and after they’d symbolically dynamited the bed, we worked out what we wanted. We then did a prototype assembly of the facade and tested it at the BRE.
I now know a lot more about stone and I feel very honoured – they said they’d only ever taken Eric Parry there before me.
Szerelmey managed the whole process for King’s Gate and built it. They were unbelievable. They did all the drawings – the most beautiful axos I’ve ever seen.
They’re a delight and a joy. We also worked with them at Westminster Coroner’s Court and I’d do every building with them if I could.
Peter Carl
Peter Carl taught me at Cambridge in the 1990s. He ran the philosophy of architecture course with Dalibor Vesely and then moved to London Met, where he supervised my PhD, Practical Poetics, about the relationship between landscape/urban design and the role of public artworks.
He’s an amazing figure. He never sees a distinction between research and practice. He is very good on the hierarchy of how things sit in the city – he calls this urban metabolism.
He is a critical friend and mentor and is unbelievably generous. I show him almost everything. I am always wondering if we can find a way to work together and make a bit of city that’s calm and dignified. This comes into focus at certain times. I tried to get him paid as a consultant on one project we did, a new public space with a large-scale artwork by the photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg on the blank western facade of Westminster City Hall. Here, an image of a forest is incorporated into GRC panels measuring 8m by 30m. You’re aware of the presence of the natural world pushing through into the city.
Working with Liza Fior of muf architecture/art is like working with Brian and Szerelemy – they’re all people who are doing things we can’t do. It makes the work we do better and richer.
I’d admired muf’s work for decades. We were working with a landscape architect on a project in Hackney and it wasn’t going well. Liza Fior was on the design review panel and told us it was rubbish and didn’t work, and eventually we ended up getting her to work on the landscape. She brings huge talent, empathy, energy, research and good ideas, and we’ve subsequently worked together on the Nova estate at Victoria for Land Securities.
She did a phenomenal assessment of everything that was wrong with Nova and was absolutely imaginative and practical in coming up with new ideas. She created a big circle for buskers and made an access ramp into the most beautiful thing – halfway up is a bench, and it’s always full. We’re now working with her on the next part of the project.
Working with her is bracing and a laugh. She’s doing work which is witty, fun, clever and joyful without being ironic or patronising.
This is an interesting group of people – part advanced material scientists, part ex-facade contractors, part alchemists making magical and strange things happen in a small factory in Dublin. They made the GRC panels for the 30m by 8m Silver Forest artwork that we created with Rut Blees Luxemburg at Kings Gate Walk on Victoria Street in London. They use cutting-edge technology but are also very artisanal – the panels were made by a couple of blokes in a workshop wearing plastic gloves and using washing up bowls.
Graphic Relief was founded by Giancarlo Iovino, who worked for many years at facade specialist Permasteelisa. We met the business through Permasteelisa’s Gartner brand, which worked on our The Zig Zag Building at Victoria.
We had to come up quickly with a proposal for a blank facade that was created when we demolished a link building to Westminster City Hall. The idea was to create a very reserved, stately installation that paid heed to the muteness of the existing tower, and worked with a rhythm of precast GRC pilasters that respond to the nearby portico.
Rut had the idea of a forest of silver birches, but we didn’t know how to get the photographic images into the concrete. We considered using big lightboxes but that looked a bit gaudy and the client didn’t want the maintenance liability. Then Graphic Relief said they could do it by enlarging the digital photo files and using a CNC arm to rout out the image in the mould, and then cast it as very thin, 13mm thick GRC tiles.
The wall is divided into six sections and then sub-divided into smaller modules. At the time, the largest sensor on digital cameras would give a resolution of 15 megapixels, which would start distorting at any size above A0, but we needed each image to go much bigger. When we tried it, we got pixels appearing and some parts of the tiles were smooth, and some rough – rather like the texture of bark. We thought this was brilliant, because it was directly related to the limits of digital photography. In the centre of the wall opposite the entrance, you look through real trees into the image of the photographic forest. But towards the edges where the street is noisier, the image dissolves and is just texture. It’s very haptic and has a hand-crafted quality.
Graphic Relief was able to make something that is both beautiful artwork and hard as nails. We had to make sure the forest could withstand the impact of a Boris bike, and tested it with all the challenges that Westminster street cleaners have to deal with every day. We’re hoping to work with the group again on a current project.
Patrick Lynch is co-founder of Lynch Architects
As told to Pamela Buxton