Chapter 2 of 24
Graphic Design Studio, London, 1987
You can see on this slide the staircase, the wooden wall to the right hand side, an applied plaster wall on top of the existing skin. The reason for this distinction between the shell and the elements, or the reasons, are numerous. First of all there is a time scale opportunity insofar that if you distinguish the, as it were, the major interventions and the treatment of the existing building, that sort of work which is obviously done on site and is generally structural or making openings or maintenance or restoration, is a very different type of work than the work of interventions, the pieces that we design, let's say in more detail in a sharper focus. The wooden wall in this slide is predominantly made off site and brought in at the last minute. That allows us more gestation time in the design process. In other words, having isolated that there will be a staircase of that sort of shape in that place, the drawings can be done to indicate that the process of costing and negotiating a price with the contractors can happen, and provisional sums can be left for the workshop pieces, and those workshop pieces then can be developed with the freedom of a bit more time.