Caruso St John: the architect duo behind London's top galleries including Damien Hirst's new Vauxhall space

After 25 years in practice together, Adam Caruso and Peter St John have become the architects of choice for the capital’s top galleries — including Damien Hirst’s handsome new space in Vauxhall
On the same wavelength: Adam Caruso and Peter St John at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd
Robert Bevan29 September 2015

After a quarter of a century of work it is the fate of many architectural practices to accept that they will be building house extensions for the remainder of their existence, or that they have morphed into commercial design factories churning out ever more bland or expedient buildings to feed the hungry payroll monster.

Not so Caruso St John. Set up in 1990 and coming to national prominence early on with its spectacular competition-winning New Art Gallery in Walsall, the practice has determinedly limited its own size and, unusually, much of its work still comes from entering (and winning) architectural competitions.

Its 25th anniversary is perfectly timed with a trio of projects that illustrate the calibre of arts schemes with which it has become associated — Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall, which opens next Thursday; the latest space in Mayfair for world-leading art dealer Larry Gagosian; and a scheme to freshen up and extend the Liverpool Philharmonic, the city’s magnificent Art Deco concert hall.

The Newport Street Gallery has been kept closely under wraps but there are reports of serene gallery spaces and exquisitely crafted staircases (just look at the practice’s glamourpuss spiralling number for Tate Britain in monochrome scallop-patterned terrazzo).

Canadian-born Adam Caruso, 53, met Englishman Peter St John, 59, after they both worked with architects Florian Beigel and Arup Associates, and the pair discovered a mutual interest in Sixties and Seventies conceptual artists and the YBAs of the early Nineties — very much their emerging contemporaries.

Old meets new: Caruso St John’s Stirling Prize-shortlisted Brick House in Westbourne Grove

They were also inspired by a love of a London that, back then, still had swathes of dereliction. It was a melancholy, everyday beauty caught on film by artist Richard Wentworth and in Patrick Kieller’s 1994 movie, London, before the financial deregulation of the 1986 Big Bang began to turn the city upside down.

“There was a lot of space,” recalls Caruso, “and you could romanticise that dereliction. London was still full of promise. Now, even here in Bethnal Green where we work, that potential has been used up — there is so much over-development.” The point isn’t to wish for dereliction but to be only too aware of what might have been…

That hasn’t stopped the pair building a clutch of beguiling, subtle projects in the capital. Among them the Stirling Prize-shortlisted Brick House that is like a contemporary grotto in a landlocked west London site; the remodelling of the Museum of Childhood; carving out exhibition spaces from within the full-to-bursting Sir John Soane’s Museum; and a new café next to 18th-century Chiswick House — the influential building that helped the work of 16th-century Italian architect Antonio Palladio become the English national style for the next two centuries.

New staircase for the Newport Street Gallery

Caruso St John’s work, which avoids a signature look, is the antithesis of the shouty one-liner architecture that has come to dominate the London skyline. A building might include decorative tiles, deep, expressive brick arches inspired by the northern European Renaissance, or splendid concrete beams that recall the timber versions found in old English country houses.

Their successful strategy has been to reference history, conjure emotion and capture the intellectual content of conceptual art to produce buildings that are unmistakably contemporary in spirit.

At the outset, Caruso St John appeared to be part of a group of architectural practices nicknamed “The Whisperers” for both their quiet and intense buildings and similar conversational style. “But as soon as Walsall was finished people realised that our work was rich,” says Caruso. “We aren’t interested in the monastic. Our work at Tate Britain is opulent. [Former director] Penelope Curtis said it reminded her of Art Deco — at first I was offended but she is right.”

London, he says, has an amazing inter-war heritage of architecture that is not quite Deco and not quite Modernist but superbly fresh. Charles Holden’s Senate House and the Bermondsey church by Goodhart-Rendel are cases in point.

“Whatever the budget we are interested in richness,” continues Caruso. “Zaha Hadid may use one shape to form the whole of an enormous building. That doesn’t feel like richness at all — it feels poor.”

Instead, the Newport Street Gallery promises a subtle luxury when it opens to display Hirst’s personal collection of 3,000 works by leading contemporary artists, beginning with its inaugural John Hoyland exhibition (reviewed on this page).

Three listed Edwardian factories that were once used to create theatre sets have been combined to create lofty white spaces perfectly judged and lit (Caruso St John often use full-size mock-ups to get the atmosphere of an interior just right). These are book-ended by a pair of sympathetic new buildings that form a sheer wall of red brick to the railway viaduct leading into Waterloo station. Inside, lusciously curvaceous staircases are finished in white-glazed brick.

Caruso St John’s buildings may each look different but that’s partly because they respond to their situation. The architects walked London’s streets endlessly and learned the importance of interpreting the locality, whether it is neighbouring structures or the economic and cultural character of the area.

This might sound obvious but in an age of globalised design it is no longer taken for granted as a starting point: “Nowadays, it has almost become a critical position,” observes Caruso.

Detractors of the practice might say they have given themselves an easy life by picking and choosing cultured clients with deep pockets rather than having to deal with hard-nosed property developers and volume housebuilders. But this ignores the fact that they are designing bank headquarters, apartment blocks and substantial business institutions across Europe — from Zurich (where they teach and have a second small office), to Germany, Belgium and France. So why aren’t they being commissioned for such commercial projects in London?

“There’s no mystery,” says Caruso. “In Flanders, Switzerland and Germany any proposal of a scale that will affect the public realm must have an architectural competition and there will be a strong, official city architect in place. Often only three practices are invited on a list drawn up by the city with the developer. And these are commercial projects, private projects. We are on these people’s radar but that doesn’t happen here.”

It is also a more efficient, linear and certain way of building quality into a city. “The developer gets what they want and the city guarantees that the developer will get planning permission. Then they go for it. If the design is crazy then you won’t win the competition.”

If such an approach were adopted in London it would help to limit the shoddy standard of much new architecture — especially mass housing. But Caruso is gloomy about the prospect given the muscle of the free market, joking that instead that the practice’s 25th birthday may mark the point when Caruso St John joins Zaha Hadid (the Olympic pool), Renzo Piano (the Shard) and Rafael Vinoly (the Walkie-Talkie) and learns to love the somewhat random computer-generated curves of “parametric” design.

Fortunately there’s no chance of that because there’s a quiet but fierce determination to Caruso St John. They know their work is exceptional. Few practices over the past quarter century have equalled them.

Newport Street Gallery, SE11 (020 3141 9320, newportstreet gallery.com) opens on October 8; Palladian Design: the Good, the Bad and the Unexpected, an exhibition designed by Caruso St John, is at Riba, Portland Place, W1 (020 7580 5533, architecture.com) until Jan 9; Caruso St John lecture at Riba on November 17

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