FINELY WROUGHT

Doing the most with the least is somewhat of a Carmody Groarke mantra, whose design approach is led by eco values and innovative thinking.

- KAREN MCCARTNEY

LONDON ARCHITECTURE practice Carmody Groarke have no doubt that their level of inventiveness and values were determined by the tough times generated by the 2008 GFC. “We were starting our practice and suddenly had no work and no clients, so we had to patch together a series of opportunities. We were never complacent about where they came from,” says director Andy Groarke. To that point their career trajectories had been relatively seamless. Australian Kevin Carmody, his fellow director, went to university in Canberra followed by a post-graduate degree at Melbourne’s RMIT while Andy Groarke, encouraged by his textile designer father pursued architecture at Sheffield University. They met, and gelled, at David Chipperfield’s London practice where collaborative competition entries tested out ideas and cemented their working relationship. Winning the prestigious US Burnham Prize and a design for the Coney Island Parachute Pavilion gave them the impetus to start their own practice.

They fully interrogated anything that came their way. “We would get inside a brief and turn it upside down,” says Andy. For example, Studio East Dining, a series of rooftop dining pavilions on a 35-metre-high carpark in East London, was constructed from re-usable scaffolding poles and covered in an industrial-grade polyethylene roof membrane. Constructed in 10 weeks with a lifespan of only three it was a fleeting but magnificent London moment overlooking the site for the 2012 Olympics.