​AA tutor Giles Smith discusses materials, architectural construction and quarrying Portland Stone

Matthew Lloyd Roberts: Giles, congratulations on being named as part of the AJ’s ‘40 under 40’! I was wondering if you could tell us about your work with Experimental Unit 7 this year, the brief focuses very closely on materials, why did you choose that as a topic?

Giles Smith: For the last couple of years the unit has been very place-specific, in our first year it was based in the North Docks at Liverpool where Assemble has been working since 2013, and then last year the studio was focused on Glasgow. So the work of the unit was really grounded in those places, the students went to visit and physically made work that we put into the world, and we also met members of the community in those specific places. That way of working wasn’t going to be possible this year, for obvious reasons, but we really wanted to hold on to the way of thinking about place and materials that grounded those first two years. We wanted to ensure that we’re having an open and frank conversation about the climate crisis in our teaching, not that the students are unaware of the problems facing the world, but because it’s urgent and critical for us all as young designers to be addressing it together.

We wanted to explore the problems of construction as the sharp end of the climate crisis in architecture. As Assemble, we established a construction company, and we’ve always taken the position that architects should be interested and engaged in how their buildings are built. Obviously many architects are involved in speculative design and construction is far from the whole story, but we really try to keep the process of building in mind in our work and teaching. Materials and their physical reality are obviously at the centre of that.

We ran an exercise at the beginning of the year, which is a tribute to Thomas Thwaites’ ‘Toaster Project’, do you know that?

Matthew: Is that the guy who built a toaster from scratch?

Giles: Yeah exactly, he tried to replicate a supermarket toaster from scratch, he went and mined his own iron ore, and moulded a plastic casing for it, all from the raw materials. This manufactured product that would have cost £5 at the shop became this multi-thousand pound project that he made completely with his own hands. It’s a very evocative way of describing the hidden complexity of everyday objects. We wanted students to understand that it is very easy for an architect to say: “that’s the mortar you’re going to use, it’s gonna be this colour, this thickness, they’re going to be bucket handle joints,” and feel very involved in the material process of construction. But actually, as architects, it is very easy to become divorced from the reality and the complexities of construction supply chains. We work with a practice called Local Works Studio who make the vital point that in the supply of food we’ve been talking about provenance, and diagnosing the problems with the supply chains for a long time, but those conversations haven’t really taken place in the construction industry. You can specify FSC approved timber, but you’re not going to learn much from that about the biodiversity in the forest where that timber was harvested.

Matthew: How have students taken to addressing these problems?

Giles: We want them to think about what it means to specify materials. So students started the year by bringing a manufactured object into the virtual studio, and we took them apart and asked where these materials come from? How does a piece of two-by-four come to be in your local branch of Travis Perkins? It is really interesting when you look at that process, tracing the wood back to the forest in Finland, and the huge containerised docks that they’re transported through. Architecture doesn’t talk about these processes enough, particularly in educational contexts, where we often talk about material in a very abstract way.

Matthew: Do you see this kind of approach as political? Are there politics in material?

Giles: Completely. In our practice we have always seen a care towards the physical construction of a building as a way of caring about the people who use that building, and the people involved in its construction. That is clearly a political idea. We think architects should be engaged with other people, not engaged and aloof. The very premise of the architect is based on distinction, a way of creating an elevated position from the menial labour of the mason, it is the creation of a white collar job to occupy a managerial position. But we’ve always been interested in breaking down that distinction and we want our students to get outside of the safe, contained world of the purely academic, speculative project and think about what it takes to actually build a proposal.

Matthew: And what kind of work have students been producing through this research?

Giles: We’re working with an organisation called GROW, a charity based in North London who work with young people, providing them with opportunities to think about their place in the world and their relationship to their environment and themselves through philosophically enquiry and growing food. So we’re at this stage in the process where the students are bringing together their in-depth research in materials with these complex and specific questions about site, place and people. We’re definitely going to continue to pursue these questions about materials, we’ve been particularly interested in some of the cutting edge research around the use of stone. As a material, stone enables you to talk about precedent in a really powerful way, examining how material construction can be used to create effects and atmospheres. It is a rich seam for understanding and thinking about how new buildings relate to their physical environment.

Several students have been thinking specifically about Portland stone, which has a rich relationship to London, it is that white limestone that for example St Paul’s is made out of. And they’ve been researching the formation of that limestone in Portland on the Dorset coast in deep geological time, the way it is quarried and excavated, the history of the quarries and the way it has been used as a material for construction over time. That approach to different scales of time and energy felt really rich. When you get into the history of resource extraction, wherever it has been happening, it is always really dense with socially ingrained rituals and traditions. Those historic relationships between resources and the communities that produce them have a lot to teach us about how we can use materials differently or better.

Matthew: Do these questions feed back into your work with Assemble?

Giles: We’re interested in the sophistication with which everyone reads architecture, and the general knowledge that everyone has about the meanings embedded in material decisions, which are very tangible to people. This material interest is something that we’re constantly returning to in our work at Assemble, with every project we’re asking what is it being built from, and what do those materials mean or represent? On stone, we’ve been working on a project with the LUMA Atelier in the south of France, where sourcing stone is central to the work. We’re interested in how everyday materials can be elevated into something really special, on working within budgetary constraints. We’ve always been interested in clay and ceramics, which led into our work on the Granby Workshop, the ceramics workshop that we set up in Liverpool. That’s been incredibly powerful to be working closely with a manufacturer, a fabricator of materials, that gives it an intensity and a connection that you’re never going to have if you just specify something out of a catalogue.

Image: 'Stone Fragment Model' by EXP7 student Giulia Rosa