03.07.2025 Homer London Store
Frank Ocean’s Homer has opened its first London store in Hatton Garden. Designed by New York based ANY, the interior recalls packaging with a profiled ceiling in gloss plaster, and a vitrine for objects in slumped glass and aluminium. Will Pirkis Architects worked with ANY and Homer to deliver the project from London. (Image Homer)
13.03.2025 LVMH
Talks on sustainable practice to fashion group LVMH, with lighting designer Pavlina Akritas. We look at how relating visual culture to technical guidance can expand the scope for carbon reduction and suggest new directions for retail. The talks reflect on Martin Margiela’s early collections from the late nineteen-eighties involving upcycling of found objects such as broken crockery, fleamarket clothing and plastic bags, and his borrowed adage ‘nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed’. We look at artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Thomas Demand and set designer Anna Viebrock, thinking about the aesthetic potential of existing things, adapting existing interiors, furniture collections and relocated objects. (Image Christo and Jeanne Claude)
23.10.2023 Lecture Newcastle
As working with existing buildings becomes increasingly part of reducing carbon in construction, ‘Fictions’ looks at how to work with what we have in a more enduring, powerful, culturally engaged way, beyond determinism. The lecture compares adapting existing buildings with the work of Jeff Wall, David Foster Wallace, Katherine Mansfield and Karl Blossfeldt, artists and writers who are able to synthesise such disparate sources as memory, association, observation, history and anecdote, without resorting to fragmentation or collage.
25.08.2022 Lecture Bydgoszcz
Lecture to students at Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology. The lecture looks at our long term interest in adapting existing buildings, both in terms of reducing the embodied carbon in building projects and the experiential possibilities of existing places. Three projects carried out with Caruso St John are discussed including Gagosian Britannia Street, which opened in 2004 with alterations from 2005 - 2020 to meet the changing needs of the gallery. New elements work together with the existing structure to make a complex atmosphere and a powerful environment for the art the gallery wanted to show, presenting a specificity and challenge welcomed by artists and curators. (Image Hélène Binet with Rachel Whiteread's Ghost)
10.08.2023 Bermondsey studio
This project converts a 900sqm warehouse in south London into a studio for an artist represented by Gagosian. It allows the artist to work on large canvases, with a growing team of technical and archivist staff, and provides facilities for display, storage, offices and private viewing. The project was developed with Westgreen Construction, London Structures Lab and services engineer Richie Daffin.
The warehouse is lined with painted wood and new spaces are made at different scales, building on the spatial implications of the existing concrete frame. The painting studio occupies the thirty metre length of the building and is distanced from the entrance by the supporting spaces, creating varying degrees of privacy.
The warehouse was built in the early nineteen-eighties with a precast concrete structure and cavity blockwork. To allow the building to be heated, the shell is insulated, with an air source heat pump feeding ceiling-mounted radiant panels. New rooflights provide improved daylighting, thermal performance and ventilation.
02.02.2021 Lecture Nottingham
Lecture to students at University of Nottingham looking at the adaptation and extension of a listed warehouse building at the Philips industrial complex in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The project was carried out with Caruso St John Architects and completed in 2021, and involved reorganising the building to provide a foodhall, flexible-let workspaces, carparking for the wider site required by current policy, and three new stories of rowhouse apartments around a courtyard on the roof. The façades of the rowhouses take on the language of curved brickwork in the existing architecture, forming a crown of rhythmic piers at the top of the building. Along with other interventions such as a new facade at ground floor level and colours gleaned from historical research, the new parts form a whole with the existing building. The lecture looks at the qualities of the existing architecture, and how alterations and additions were designed in a way that amplified or transformed them. (Image Filip Dujardin)
30.08.2022 Garden studio, north London
A studio for two artists in the large garden of an Edwardian terrace house bordering Wanstead Flats. The studio contains a workshop for each artist and a clean space between, for working together, hosting or holding exhibitions. The garden can be accessed either through the house or from the Flats at the rear, allowing different possibilities for daily routine or curating shows. The studio gives shape to the garden, together with an extension to the house.
The design draws on images familiar to the Flats such as the cricket pavilion, with its long frontage, wood structure and painted wood linings. It works with the idea of the shed as a building that is built and not just clad in timber. As evoked in Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), which involved piling earth on a found shed until the central beam broke, bringing attention to the most basic element of the structure.