Under canvas

Kevin Carmody (left) and Andy Groarke

Carmody Groarke’s studio looks down on the bustle of London’s Denmark Street, a little street once thronged with songwriters, its shop windows now populated by a candy-bright crowd of guitars. After the crowded, gaudy displays, the young architects’ office is a calming refuge of pale wood and stripped-back furniture sitting among a series of exquisite models in glass cases, as precious as art objects – and as elegantly conceived and constructed.

The big model sitting on the table when I visit is rougher, a working piece of kit, something that looks like a bit of tent. Which is precisely what it is. What is there to design in a tent? That is the question that Frieze founders Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp have been posing to architects for the last few years. The art fair (which is to go into a New York edition in 2012) has become a phenomenon and a big part of its appeal is its particularly English evocation of a garden pavilion or a marquee. This is art in the park, an escape from the ubiquitous nowhereville of the convention hall that houses most international events.

So far some of the brightest architects working at the margins between art and architecture, between display and effect, have created Frieze tents; David Adjaye, Caruso St John and Jamie Fobert. What Carmody Groarke have come up with, though, is a revelation, a significant leap in how the tents will be perceived in their setting and a series of spaces providing relief from the crowded, commercial intensity of the fair.

“Once we’ve provided the space for the galleries,” says the Australian half of the duo, Kevin Carmody, “half of our role is to work with artists in the special installations, and half is to create ‘feature areas’, the cafés, VIP areas and open spaces. There’s 20,000 sq m of tent here – as much as in the Millennium Dome.”

The most striking part of the new plan is for a series of new “pavilions”, irregular tent volumes that negotiate the tricky paths between existing trees. They create little courtyards, each with a tree at its centre. “We pushed the structures towards the edges so they could create a new identity for the fair. We looked at the trees not as obstacles but as generators of new structures,” explains Andrew Groarke, “and the new spaces provide a break from the buzzing art environment. For the first time people will be able to get a gulp of fresh air without leaving the fair.”

Frieze founder Matthew Slotover is obviously pleased with his architects. “What’s really smart is that Carmody Groarke looked at both the economic model and the limitations of the trees. They asked questions which weren’t really architectural – about how we can generate more space and how we can use that [revenue] to build bespoke pavilions. Every year people need to feel it’s not always the same thing, that there’s something new.”

The model for the Frieze Art Fair entrance pavilions

And this will do it. The structure, the timber I-beams and polycarbonate cladding, will be demountable and reusable, so that they can be reassembled and reconfigured for next year’s fair. Very green. Very bright. Very Carmody Groarke.

The architects, who established their practice five years ago after working together for David Chipperfield, have made a name for themselves with a series of inventive and enjoyable temporary structures. Last year’s Studio East Dining, atop of the breezy multi-storey car park of what is the now completed Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, created a magical space overlooking the Olympic site. Wittily constructed from site materials – tarpaulins, construction lights, scaffolding and boards, it was a comment on the process of construction and its contingent creative and adaptive intelligence. But it was also a green structure with not a splinter or screw wasted.

Then there was the Skywalk (2008, in conjunction with NLA), a piece of theatrical cityscape by the British Museum which transformed the nature of a public space and the way people moved through it and looked at the architecture using only basic boards and structure. And there was the odd collaboration with the Fondazione Prada and artist Carsten Höller that saw the transformation of a grotty Islington space into the “Double Club” a chic, half- Congolese, half-London back alley nightspot for a few over-booked months.

“The temporary architecture,” explains Carmody, “always becomes a test bed for other architecture projects.”

What is surprising is that, alongside their success in creating memorably fleeting architectural events, they have designed a pair of striking and, I think, under-rated memorials – the building type that is, more than any other, about embedding the permanent presence of memory in the fabric of the city. The 7/7 memorial in Hyde Park is a series of rough-cast stainless steel columns, the heat and intensity of their making expressing something of the ferocity of the bombs and the impact of the tragedy on the city. It is a beautiful memorial that avoids monumentality and skirts the intriguing territory between sculpture and architecture. Earlier this year their memorial to the victims of the Indian Ocean Tsunami was unveiled outside London’s Natural History Museum, a simple, massive, carved block of stone, its permanence and weight the seeming opposite to a fluid wave which nevertheless crushed towns and lives.

As if to build on their base of impermanence, Carmody Groarke’s other growth area has been exhibition design. Many young architects work sporadically in the field – it doesn’t pay well but it does guarantee a certain amount of exposure and perhaps a little fun in the thrill of realising an often quite radical design quickly and cheaply. The huge Postmodernism show just opened at London’s V & A, the final blockbuster in a run that has embraced Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernism and Cold War Modern, is another Carmody Groarke set. “Exhibition design is about contriving a memorable visitor experience,” says Groarke, “in a way slightly similar to the memorials. An exhibition needs to be both foreground and background and it provides an opportunity to make architecture outside the context of the city but at the same time in a very pure way, with none of the functional baggage of permanent architecture. Both memorial and exhibitions are ultimately about a visitor experience and they both need to be explicit in intent without explanation.”

The PoMo show is a stunner, blending 1980s nightclub chic with proper museum space for the movement’s hideous but undeniably striking furniture and its exquisite drawings. The duo have managed to accommodate the diverse exhibits without themselves veering into the disputed and dangerous territory of Lost Modern aesthetics themselves. Groarke continues by talking about their installation “Blind Light” with Anthony Gormley at the Hayward Gallery in 2007 (in which visitors blindly wandered around in a glass box filled with fog of steam). “The ‘Double Club’ and ‘Blind Light’ showed a polarity of ways of achieving an immersive experience, the way in which they are both singular and collective experiences, about the individual perception of the work and the social experience of seeing it and being seen.”

Of course, there is always the pragmatic aspect. “Exhibitions were one of the few ways a young studio like ours could find opportunities to build and test ideas,” says Carmody. “We had to look to the margins of contemporary architecture – to the memorial and the exhibition.”

“We were asked by some people,” Groarke tells me, “why people want to see Postmodernism in a museum. Surely they can see all this stuff on YouTube or on the internet? But people still want to see the physical artefacts and they also want to be involved in the culture of consuming culture. They want to see other people reacting to the same stuff.”

www.carmodygroarke.com