Art on the high street | Archive Titles | Building Design 26/10/2013 19:07

Saturday26 October 2013

Art on the high street

1 February 2000

Caruso St John is an enigma. The practice claims to work hard at designing buildings that are part of the everyday. Yet, although it is sandwiched between a Woolworths and
a BHS, its competition-winning Walsall Art Gallery, which opens this month, is far from ordinary.

Caruso St John is relieved to be out of Clerkenwell. The practice used to share a building on Clerkenwell Road with Muf and Fat (the latter used to nick their loo paper), when
Clerkenwell rents were still cheap and designer bars a nascent form. At first, Bethnal Green seemed a bit too far especially since the slimmed down post-Walsall practice is
alone in the corner of the Coates Cotton factory it's doing up. But everyone has adjusted and it is only ten minutes away from Clerkenwell by bike. 'Some people like to be
surrounded by the scene; for us, it's not an issue,' says Adam Caruso.

This group discussion is a curio of Caruso St John. It's common to hear the pair describe themselves as part of a very particular group, which seems to include Florian Beigel,
for whom they both worked, Tony Fretton and proteg practice Sergison Bates: 'It's a bit insular'. Simultaneously, the practice is described as radical, outside the system, on
the edge of a group a powerful position, which editors of foreign magazines (and Caruso and St John themselves) seem to enjoy. And yet the practice is a perfect example
of what the contemporary, pro-active, competition generated, matching funding system is supposed to produce.

But as examplars often are, Caruso St John and its Walsall project is almost completely exceptional. It's not all that common for a young practice, supported by teaching
(until recently at North London University) and small private jobs, to gain recognition through the competition system; to actually win the ideal, regional arts gallery project;
and even less common for it to produce an indubitably admirable public building right away. And while the gallery looks like a vindication of lottery/European funded
buildings in the regions, Caruso St John says it exposes the weaknesses of the current system. Most local authorities simply don't have the resources to make the competitive
procurement system compete with the huge city projects. It took an exceptional client Peter Jenkinson to get this project built.

Caruso and St John certainly won the right competition. The timing was good: they've being doing competitions 'very seriously' since the early 1990s, 'the first time for 20
years anybody could consistently do competitions'. They are clearly relieved now that they didn't win either the Museum of Scotland or the Birmingham Foyer project, for
which they were shortlisted by the time they got Walsall. By then, they'd become adept at spotting a well-organised competition. Walsall, they say, was the best funding in
place and brief written before the competition and an excellent client of their own generation who gave them full support without any 'debilitating anxieties' caused by their
age and relative inexperience.

The transition from tiny office to running a substantial job is always tricky. The office was kept small and tight, with a particular, 'almost perverse team structure' with
elaborate systems for producing the nearly 30 working drawings, where any person detailing the cladding, say, had to know the details of everything the cladding touched
'A big learning experience. We'll never do another job that way'. The main part of the transition was learning to delegate and have staff, and 'monitoring the office to keep
complete control' of the project. There was no ambition to become a big office, which helped.

The physical object is the thing thats working: the media is the matter.

The question of how they manage an office is key, because they design everything alone together then present it to the office. The intensity of their highly achieved
counterpoint becomes evident when we're discussing how they design windows. There's a long discussion about the difference between glazing, framed windows and walls
with the cladding ripped off. They take quite different positions and start to set out their views: more to each other than me, and the bones of the argument become visible
(St John is broadly rationalist, Caruso talking about views and adjustment and material). 'We're both very visually critical.'

While looking almost simple, Walsall is technically very complex. The services engineer called it a 'Swiss watch with a fantastically complex integration of services'. It may
look loose fit, but everything is working extraordinarily hard. This is a very strong characteristic of their work, and for my money it's what makes it beautiful. 'It is not the
disingenuous, Corbusien notion of the simple, stripped physical form,' Caruso explains, 'but is more like the pull of minimalist and conceptual art. The physical object is the
thing that's working: the media is the matter'.

This looks like high architecture another mild anomaly because their buildings can also look almost cartoonlike in their exquisite workaday-ness. They are critical of the
British media emphasis on 'Big A' architecture. But their critical stance on the RIBA awards (self-defeatingly self seeking), and the UK architectural media (covering nothing
seriously) is generally acute and welcomed. They are without doubt designers one would wish to see the system continue to support.

Source: Riba Journal

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