2nd ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design
Job No: CPD0810-27/4028150-169 Chapter 3 final (3.5)_.qxd:layouts to chapter one 8/18/10 12:52 PM Page 158
The design projectConstruction and occupationDo the parallels between art practice and the craft of
building construction help to reinforce the element of
craft in your architecture?
Steve Tompkins
I think it very much does that. A lot of the buildings we do
end up being hand-finished in one form or another, either by
the contractor but often by the client’s own teams. We are
working with clients who have got production capacity and
will often try and build in a phase where we can complete
and tune the building with the clients. So decoration, final
second fix, fit-out, furniture design – all of those things we’ve
quite often done with direct labour.
How have your collaborations with artists informed your
thinking?
Graham Haworth
We often work with artists to amplify the objectives or
character of a project. We worked with Jake Tilsen on the
London Library and he did a photographic journal of the
existing fabric of the building: it’s like a palimpsest that’s
been written over and we wanted that to be made clear.
One thing that’s interesting working with artists is there’s a
kind of tension, because of the way we work. You can’t just
go to your studio and do the perfect pure thing, you’re having
to engage with the junk of everyday living; people messing
with your ideas. Artists are really precise about their work,
they don’t compromise; they record everything. We do
hundreds of sketches; they’ll all get thrown away. Artists are
very precise about the way things are conceived and working
with artists has made us take the conceptual side of our work
more seriously.
Steve Tompkins
It’s also given us a more dense understanding of material and
surface and meaning of material and surface. An artist will
spend an enormous amount of time on tactile or pigment
quality of the surface and it’s made us see those things in
a much more detailed way. For example, we’ve hand-finished
a lot of concrete work at Snape because we couldn’t specify
what we wanted to do, so we ended up doing it ourselves in
the way that an artist would do it.Text
2nd ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design
Job No: CPD0810-27/4028150-169 Chapter 3 final (3.5)_.qxd:layouts to chapter one 8/18/10 12:54 PM Page 158