Many architects like to say that they practise attention to detail. (As, you may say, they should.) Sometimes this statement is a form of faint self-praise, a signal not to expect too much more from their work, an excuse for being a bit dull. Not so with Adam Caruso and Peter St John. “We spend a lot of time on the detail,” says the latter. “That’s what we enjoy and that’s what we expect every project to have.” But their preoccupation is not dutiful. It’s what makes their projects zing. It makes the spaces they design richer and curiouser than they would otherwise be. If you experience a kind of heightened attention in their architecture, that’s because they put it there.
Their attitude has, over the past 34 years, made their practice, Caruso St John, one of the best of their generation. It has also led them to be somewhat estranged from the land where they set up their business, Britain, whose commercial culture is not always conducive to subtlety and care. “Developers are too powerful in this country,” says Caruso (who is Canadian), “and everything is deliberately upped in terms of crudity and brashness.” The duo, who have offices in London and Zurich, have thrived better in continental European nations – Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and France – where city planners use “proper competition systems” to raise the quality of architecture.
In Britain, Caruso St John tend to get confined to niches, such as work for Oxbridge colleges and with historic and artistic buildings, “where people really care about how buildings are built”. Here, they won the Stirling prize in 2016 with their Newport Street Gallery in south London, a conversion of listed industrial buildings for Damien Hirst. In other countries they are entrusted with large office and apartment buildings – the places, that is to say, where many of us spend most of our lives.
It is only now that they are completing their first such development in the UK, the 24,000 sq metre, £101m St Pancras Campus, London. It’s also “probably the last”, says Caruso. Like many architects, they want to minimise the carbon emissions that come with new building and wherever possible reuse old ones. In their recent Royale Belge project, for example, they opened up a 1970s office block in Brussels to public use with a dramatic circulating space cut out of its centre.
The St Pancras Campus is on a site formerly of industrial sheds in a zone where the building boom of the King’s Cross area encounters the quieter residential streets of the borough of Camden – terraces that retain some of the dusty aura of the films that were shot around here in the days when this area still embodied urban grit. There’s a canal nearby and remnants of manufacturing. There are collisions of scales and histories, of which Caruso St John’s design seeks to make sense. The new development, they say, is “arguably too big for its site”, so they have put “a lot of energy” into breaking up its bulk.
Thanks in part to the influence of the borough of Camden’s planners, the project is not a monolithic office building but a city block, a place of several uses and social groups, gathered around shared spaces that are accessible to everyone. It has flats, both for social and market rent, some retail, and as much new industrial space as was demolished. A broad route crosses the site, with a lush little garden by Jonathan Cook Landscape Architects in its centre and a covered street serving the workshops running off to one side. The office lobby, a muscular space of steel columns and beams, is available to the public, and comes with a cafe attached. This is the kind of city-making that architects dream of but don’t often achieve: an array of compressed and generous spaces with the multiplicity and openness of beloved towns from the past.
The whole is unified by the design of the fabric and facades, with a palette of reddish stone and white concrete that echoes the brick and stucco of the neighbouring houses. A gridded pattern is applied to both offices and homes, but with changes in scale and treatment to reflect their different uses. It is enriched with touches of material pleasure – glazed green bricks that glisten in the shadowy parts of the complex, and rough, corduroy-like fluting on one face of the otherwise smooth pillars. The architects enjoy playing with the apparent substance of the construction; sometimes it looks like pure surface, as flat as can be, at other times carved and solid.
Their attention to detail extends inside, even to the interiors of the lifts, and to the “fanciest affordable housing lobby in London”, with green ribbed tiles and a patterned terrazzo floor. The walls of the office lobby are lined with timber slats, painted on their edges to look green from one direction and purple from another. Everything feels made and intended, and finished with a high degree of precision. It is a speculative building treated with the artistry of a gallery; a work of London urban vernacular translated into Swiss.
In Arbroath, Scotland, Caruso St John have recently finished the latest phase of a project much more typical of their British commission – a patient, thoughtful renewal of a historic location dedicated to art. This is Hospitalfield, a large Victorian house grafted on to medieval fragments, the creation of the painter Patrick Allan Fraser and his wife, Elizabeth Fraser, after whose deaths it was bequeathed “for the promotion of education in the arts”. Its style is piled-up baronial with details all of its own, much-turreted and many-gabled, a bold and eccentric stitched-together composite.
It is now used for artists’ residencies, with the public welcomed into its gardens, which have been revived and enriched by the landscape designer Nigel Dunnett, and (on tours) into the house. Here, the architects have been working with Hospitalfield’s director, Lucy Byatt, for (so far) 10 years, both to open it up more and to rescue it from decades of neglect. They have restored a 19th-century fern house and designed a cafe next door in similar glassy style. They have renovated studios and designed a new one, and added some functional necessities. Planned for the future are a courtyard of rooms for visitors to stay, and a gallery to display collections and new work. It is a work of architectural gardening that “brings each part of the site to life”, as the architects put it, “and allows things to regenerate”.
Some of Caruso St John’s intervention is so discreet you’d hardly know it’s there; some is about growing new architecture from the inner wonkiness of the old. The fern house and cafe, for example, look at first sight like regular greenhouses, except that the irregularities of the existing stone walls are allowed to push the new work into unexpected angles. The most striking addition is the new studio, a pale, tiled shed amplified by the castle’s spirit of exaggeration. It is made only of essentials – eaves, rafters, gutters, cladding, two big windows; the adjustments necessary to fit on to old walls – but each has its own punchy character. This lightweight construction is as different as can be from its masonry surroundings, but it still seems to belong.
What connects a commercial block in London to a quietly delightful arts centre in the county of Angus is attention not only to detail but to what Caruso St John call “the circumstances” of a project, to its what and where as well as its how. Both respond to their location and use, and as result are completely different from each other. These architects have no preconceived idea of what a building should look like, and they know when to hold back and let a place speak for itself. Which is not to say that they are shy and retiring – a work like St Pancras Campus is uningratiating, metaphorically spiky, none too anxious to please.
Now they relish the prospect of putting renovation at the centre of their work. “We’re not doing competitions for new buildings now,” says Caruso. “I really don’t see the point. Also I don’t know what one would do, I don’t know what’s interesting.” If the St Pancras project really is their new-build swansong, it’s not a bad way to finish off.
Caruso St John’s greatest hits
New Art Gallery Walsall
West Midlands, 2000
This 30-metre off-kilter cube was Caruso St John’s breakout success, reshaping Walsall’s skyline and putting the young architects firmly on the map.
Brick House
Westbourne Grove, London, 2005
Earning them a spot on the Stirling Prize shortlist, the radically asymmetrical Brick House was designed to occupy a particularly awkward plot of land, squeezed between earlier residential buildings.
Newport Street Gallery
Vauxhall, London, 2015
The practice finally won the Stirling prize 10 years later with this loving conversion of numerous existing industrial buildings, originally as a London home for Damien Hirst’s art collection.
Royale Belge
Brussels, 2023
Showcasing their developing preference for renovating old buildings over creating new ones from scratch, this mammoth undertaking saw Caruso St John repurposing and updating a gigantic modernist office block on the outskirts of Brussels. Kit Buchan
