Hannah Tourell, Derek Gibbons and Eric Parry discuss how the practice has utilised long-standing relationships to maximise shared learning on materials and ensure a smooth specification process.
Senior architectural technician Derek Gibbons (left), principal Eric Parry and associate Hannah Tourell.
Words
Jason Sayer
Photos
Agnese Sanvito
In 1983, Eric Parry set up his eponymous studio above a garage in Cambridge while he was teaching at the university. There, ideas on materials and their wider relationship with the process of architecture began to crystalise. More than 20 years later, the practice moved to Banner Street in London (just north of the Barbican) where it remains to this day, and where those ideas are now writ large in numerous projects across the capital. An intense focus on the inter-relationship of objects, components, the site and materials – in particular stone, ceramic and metal – is integral to the studio’s thinking, as associate Hannah Tourell, senior architectural technician Derek Gibbons, and principal
Eric Parry explain.
How do you store materials used from previous projects?
Eric Parry We have various bits of storage but a lot of the models and drawings – our portfolios – are in art store, so they’re professionally stored and archived. We also have a pretty good handle on material storage, which is easily accessed from our studio, so we can call up things, like, for example, lettering designed by Tom Perkins for the poem by Andrew Motion around the lightwell at St Martin in
the Fields (2008).
It’s got more organised over time. We always produce a hard copy of the as-built drawings. I don’t think you can isolate materials. Drawings, models, materials and thinking: for us it’s a big soup. Besides those as-built drawings, we have a material samples board for every project.
For planning and for clients, the business of the representation of a project – the materials board – is always terribly important, as is the representation of things. Visiting the planners I would often take an object. For example, I once took a David Mellor-designed spoon, and on another occasion, a Bavarian beer jug that related to a particular ceramic we were looking to use for a building in the city. It’s about objects that manifest the qualities of a material we’re looking to specify.
Metalwork finishes from Tuchschmid, serving as studies for ‘Opera Terrace’, a project on the roof terrace of Covent Garden in London. “The project employs a series of trusses that have to fold back and fold upwards. There were questions of whether it should be mild steel or not, and if it should be treated in a particular way. There are numerous grades of stainless steel, and we considered various finishes from chrome to sandblasting. This is just part of that journey.”
What level of depth do you go down to with those material boards?
Hannah Tourell Really just the key material palettes: one for façades and one for a couple of key interior spaces. Everyone has to do a material board by the end of the project. They are then catalogued by Derek Gibbons – one of the most experienced members in our office. Sometimes people take things off material boards so it’s also about keeping an eye on all of it! We also have larger pieces of buildings in the office, such as 1:1 scale components and mock-ups, to represent interesting or important architectural aspects of a project, which we’re keen to retain for reference.
Eric Parry That’s one of the advantages of the terrace – we can keep larger objects out there. We took a lease on a little building on the roof and built a few full-scale protypes there to test relationships, shadows, etc.
Vitreous enamelled steel supplied by Omera, used for studies of various current projects.
Derek Gibbons There are sample boards we did after every project, listing manufacturers and materials… but we’ve accumulated so much we need additional storage and additional referencing for the materials we’ve used. After every job, we have a whole range of materials, as well as variations of the same material, which are catalogued and which we have whittled down to fit onto one sample board that represents the project in question. But that means we end up with leftover samples and materials that don’t make it onto a project’s samples board – and we don’t want to lose the thinking behind those materials as that knowledge might be useful for a future project – you never know!
We have employed a librarian to reassess how we store and access these physical materials. And trade literature now is accessed online, so we don’t necessarily have a physical requirement for that anymore. I have spoken to a company who will set up a link to a website for all your materials. Each material has a code that links to a system explaining how it was used on a job, including a detail. Everything that was used would be recorded and anybody going to a new job would know exactly how to access all that information from the office. But right now, it’s just a matter of storage.
Study for Salisbury Square development, London. Hot forged steel from CB Arts, power hammered, galvanised, patinated and lacquered. “There’s often a conversation about tonality and depth, which was particularly evident with the Salisbury Square project for the City of London Police. We were thinking of using a vivid shade of red associated with that police force set against spandrels, which are in turn set against the absorbance of weathering steel. All of which means that right now we are working with a palette of possibilities. I think that is a very interesting stage – stage five to be precise – because everything is in the process of being made, where stuff is becoming real.”
What was the trigger for this new way of thinking about the materials library?
Derek Gibbons Moving upstairs… we had to bring so many materials upstairs.
Eric Parry It also traces back to an academic interest. I remember when I first got my job as an assistant lecturer at Cambridge. I was running Third Year, but I had to create a lecture series on something I called ‘The iconography of materials’, because I was interested in the bridge between history, theory and practice. Each lecture was on a material and each material had a historic lineage of importance. Each project has a narrative to it about the use of materials and retaining that information is absolutely critical to the way we practice.
Cast iron and aluminium samples from AATI used for One Liverpool Street, London. From left to right: cast iron –natural cast finish; cast iron – shot-blasted finish; cast aluminium – natural cast finish; cast aluminium -– shot-blasted finish.
What about projects that didn’t make it off the boards, do you retain the material thinking for them? And if so how?
Eric Parry It’s only when a project gets to a certain point of formality that we have a sample board that we’d keep for it. We tend not to use CGIs much at the early stages of a project as we prefer sketches and drawings. There’s a nice amount of looseness and freedom that comes with that way of working. We might include an object or a material to indicate certain things, but not a full materials sample board.
Studies for a cast metal balustrade supplied by FSC Foundry for Chelsea Barracks, London. From left to right: cast aluminium – painted finish; cast iron.
What about material experimentation? How is that process recorded?
Eric Parry I find I get a bit frustrated when I look back sometimes. We’re ISO 9001 compliant, so quality control is important. And as a result, we have a quality audit. But when you look back through our project history from an archival/reporting perspective, to me it’s always a bit too banal; it doesn’t really tell the story of the project and its genesis, it just tends to be a summary at the end of it.
How closely do you work with suppliers?
Eric Parry Very closely, and that dialogue is what makes projects ‘live’. There are examples where we’ve done a job and then the manufacturer has gone bust – it happens. The world of contracting and fabrication is a tough one and sort of a generational cycle. So, because of that, recording all the information about how, for example, a façade system worked is incredibly important for another generation of makers to be able to use.
The relationship with manufacturers is incredibly intimate, in the sense of being aware of all the potential issues, and being a way for people to improve their methods. For example, going to the quarry when specifying stone and seeing the quality of the material, because with natural materials you never know what’s coming next.
Hannah Tourell We’re lucky to have a good relationship with façade consultant FMDC. They produce material booklets for us, which is a really useful resource for referencing purposes. We also record the challenges we come across with various manufacturers. We always feed back to them, and then they take that into consideration for future projects.
It’s a nice process of collaboration and learning together; working out how we can better specify. FMDC has worked with suppliers and then they’ve helped us learn how to better specify. And now, we’re going to use all that information and have a much smoother journey because we have this resource and we can have better conversations at earlier stages with contractors and subcontractors.
Shot-peened stainless steel lettering from Tuchschmid used for St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.
Eric Parry Our relationship with FMDC is very important and goes back a very long time to when the founding director worked at Arup, and I was really determined to have a self-supporting stone elevation on a building that’s now 25 years old at Pembroke College, Cambridge. And we’ve worked with them on almost every project since. It’s a continuous run that essentially means we have about 20 years of common, parallel experience, which is incredibly valuable.
I use the analogy of turning over a Persian rug: when you turn it over, you see the stitch and you can appreciate the dye. To see the work that’s gone on, you need to turn it over. I believe that with architecture, you need to be able to understand the story through the materials and their use in order to have a critical attitude to the problem. We’re not involved in stage design. These buildings, for instance, the City of London Police building at Salisbury Square, have a 125-year life. All our detailing has to work to that. It’s interesting to have these questions of longevity and buildings in mind.
Hot-forged steel from CB Arts, which has been galvanised, painted and lacquered, and used as a study for Charterhouse, London.
What material are you excited to use next?
Eric Parry What’s really exciting is the combination of components at Salisbury Square. We’ve got the exoskeleton building for the City of London Police, plus an adjacent law courts building (an 18-court complex in stone) facing Fleet Street, and then the third building, which is employing ram-pressed, unglazed terracotta. That’s taken us to a really interesting point with research, building on what we have already done with faience.
We’re working with an American supplier, Boston Valley Terracotta for this, and undertaking a research project with them exploring the glazed and unglazed terracotta faience elements that they’re producing. Together, we’re also examining the relationship of faience and ‘growth’ – integrating terracotta with a green wall; letting the ceramic morph into something else to reflect the quality of the growth of lichen that has been involved with the unglazed faience.
Source: Architecture Today