The Feeling of Things

In their work, Caruso St John Architects are often provoked and inspired by the work of artists, and the title of this lecture comes from an essay on the work of Claes Oldenburg. They admire Oldenburg’s early work form the 1960s at the Storefront Gallery in New York, where he made sculpture of familiar objects, while distorting scale and using a visceral materiality to give these objects a strong emotional character. Coming immediately after the abstract expressionism of Pollock, this work was not abstract. Instead its poignancy came from its relation to the everyday world.

Caruso St John Architects like the idea that their work starts with an awareness of the emotional character of buildings. Buildings have a character drawn from the associations of their form and the materiality of their fabric. Obviously, one can never predict what someone’s reaction to a building will be, but above all they are trying to get away from an abstract or a diagrammatic architecture, and to get towards an architecture that is richly associative. The modernist pursuit of the ideal and the new for its own sake seems to them both hopeless and pathetic. They prefer characterful ugliness to calculated perfection.

The interests of Caruso St John Architects lie somewhere between the physical nature of building, where construction can create a physical response, and appearance, where the image strangely recalls commonly understood forms, traditions and typologies. Above all they want to find some way to communicate. Peter St John will show six projects across the span of their practice, both built works and recent competition designs, and he will talk about their sources.

Peter St John
studied at the AA in London.
1990 established own practice with Adam Caruso in London.
1999-2001 University of North London and visiting professors in Mendrisio (CH).
2004 guest professor at the University of Bath.
Some of their works:
The New Art Gallery and Public Square in Walsall, Gagosian Gallery and a directional signage system for the Bankside area of London.
1999 Winners of an invited competition for the renewal of the historic city square around the baroque cathedral of Kalmar in Sweden.
2003 first phase of the practice’s masterplan for the Museum of Childhood in London.
Caruso St John Architects has considerable expertise in the design of arts spaces and arts buildings. Invitations to design exhibitions at a number of leading institutions, including the Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Cartier Foundation in Paris and the Pitti Palace in Florence.

Weitere Informationen:

• Caruso St John Architects