15 Clerkenwell Close

Load-bearing limestone mixed use building comprising 8 apartments and architect’s studio.

History of the building

The brief made time available to investigate context and a number of possible loose fit solutions for a replacement building that would sit within the all but vanished grounds of an C11th limestone Norman abbey. Originally built by Baron Jordan Briset, it was expanded and remodelled until its C16th dissolution brought religious revolution, precipitating a gradual erosion through subdivision and conversion into grand houses for the newly protestant barons. Oliver Cromwell bringing republican revolution and replacing baronial mansions with a new and sober home before the restoration saw yet further subdivision into smaller rented properties that by the C19th briefly housed Marx and a visiting Lenin. Ignominiously a furniture sales room occupied a the remains of the original abbey dining halls and cloister before fire and the 1970s left only a few stones and the road layout as a memory of the nunnery.

The Normans discovered that limestone, when kept freshly wet from the quarry remains soft enough to more easily carve before calcifying for strong fortifications. Helpful in successfully establishing conquests and later for finer tracery in religious and buildings of state. For arguably better weathering, fire and structural integrity that knowledge and skill of combining material and structure to help define an architecture has been lost through the ubiquitous layering of over cladding frames.

Using a limited choice of self-finished materials, carved and fallen columns, revealed cloisters and mosaic floors 15 Clerkenwell Close at first alludes to a local physical and social archaeology, but also raises questions on architectural heritage and its integration within a broader culture. Reminding us the literacy of the built and broader environment is based on understanding and disseminating through building the poetic possibilities inherent within the structural and aesthetic qualities of all materials available and that together make up the vocabulary of all architectural languages. Especially important today given that stone has an embodied carbon footprint 95% lower than steel and 80% lower than concrete. Yet its natural sedimentary finish of fossilised coral and ammonite shells is mistaken even by experts elected onto planning committees as concrete, its structural nature as applique. Controversially regarded as aesthetically "ugly and bizarre" when compared to adjacent poor quality brick clad steel framed structures that lower the intellectual and built culture of the original Georgian and Victorian buildings they so poorly attempt to "fit-in" with.