Architecture Paper #3 by:

November 2013 Edwin Heathcote

POP-UP ARCHITECTURE Case Studies:

6a architects and Eley Kishimoto
Assemble
Haworth Tompkins
Carmody Groarke
Richard Wentworth and Gruppe
 Edwin Heathcote explores the phenomenon
of temporary pop-ups that have appeared
across London in recent years and considers
why this approach has caught the imagination
of designers and audiences alike.
Pop-Up
Architecture
Architecture might seem to be the opposite of pop-up:
it is associated with solidity, permanence and a
connection to the earth or the street. But the phenom-
enon of the temporary, inspired by instant buzz
generated by agit prop and protest, by theatrical events,
art installations, markets, festivals, food, the relentless
search for novelty, even the ingenuity of the informal
settlements (‘favela chic’) has become firmly
entrenched in British architectural culture.
The pop-up building or installation both emerges
from and addresses a series of contemporary issues
in architecture. Perhaps the most obvious of these
is a recession which makes it difficult for architects to
find work, difficult for small practices to find commis-
sions and extremely difficult for those who want to
create works for the public good and for public space.
Pivotal in the growth of the pop-up phenomenon
has been the confluence of a number of trends.
The first of these is a renewed interest in making. As
the construction industry becomes more industrialised
and as architects are pushed further into the role
of sub-contractors, they find themselves increasingly
marginalised, peripheral to the process of making and
unable to intervene or improvise or use their architec-
tural intelligence as construction progresses. This loss
of control has led to a significant sub-culture of
architects and academics who see a renewed and direct
engagement with the processes of construction as
a critical aspect of architectural education. End of
year student shows are now likely to feature large-scale
constructions – usually in timber – acting both as
theatrical intervention and as attestations of the ambition
and craft skills of the students. This in itself can be
understood as a reaction against the prevalence of
computer graphics as an end in themselves – architec-
ture for a virtual world. The pop-up provides the visceral
engagement with construction, materials and gravity
2 Architecture Paper #3
that the virtual image lacks. Paradoxically however,
it is also equally likely that the rise of 3D printing will
itself become a part of the pop-up phenomenon.
We can begin to understand the rise of the
pop-up as a kind of reaction against digital ephemerality
but also as a mechanism for increasing the agency
of the designer. As young architects find it more
difficult to gain commissions without the experience
of the bigger building types which is now often
required, they find themselves shut out of the industry
and are increasingly turning to the temporary as a
more direct means of expression.
The temporary installation also allows participation
by a community in the process of construction and
this physical engagement can give the temporary
a firmer presence in the memory of place. A key
component of the success of pop-ups has been the
way in which they are able to either reinforce a sense
of place or create associations where there were
none before. In this way developers are beginning
to realise that they are able to shape perceptions
of a site before construction works begin so that when
it is completed the finished structure appears rooted
in context and neighbourhood.
Architects have no doubt also been encouraged
by the success of the pavilion typology in the arts,
notably the annual Serpentine Pavilion, which has
attracted the biggest names in world architecture
but also to other collaborations between artists and
architects which have found their medium in the
pavilion or installation form.
The conditions, both economic and intellectual,
which have led to the inexorable rise of pop-up
architecture, are becoming entrenched. There are
objections; that pop-up encourages complacency; that
it stops designers looking for the permanent solutions
to the real problems; that it is the playground for
right:
Haworth Tompkins:
The Shed, 2013
Photo: Philip Vile, 2013

below:
Assemble:
Folly for a Flyover, 2011
Photo: David Vitner, 2011

bottom right:
6a architects and
Eley Kishimoto:
Hairywood, 2005
Photo: David Grandorge, 2005

November 2013 3

dilettantes and rich kids who can afford to eschew
real jobs; that it glamorises the aesthetic of informal
settlements without any insight into the conditions
which give rise to them. There is also an inevitable
commercialisation of the pop-up, with a danger of it
being co-opted by a corporate culture. Yet despite
all this, there is no doubt that it is here to stay.
Finally (and as evidenced by this choice of case
studies) this is a largely London phenomenon which
has barely penetrated Britain’s other cities. As the
conditions which have led to its rise, from economic
and social to aesthetic and environmental, are still
with us, the pop-up is likely to remain an increasingly
important arena and medium for young architects
to experiment and express their ideas.
6a architects and Eley Kishimoto
Hairywood, 2005
Inspired, rather incongruously, by a moment from
a Jacques Tati film (Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot,
1953) in which a character begins each day by
throwing her window open and admiring the view
to the sea, Hairywood was a plywood tower in a
courtyard off London’s gritty Old Street, then the yard
of the Architecture Foundation.
The structure was a curious sight. A collaboration
between architects 6a and fashion designers Eley
Kishimoto, it referred to everything from Rapunzel
and Monsieur Hulot to Art Nouveau. The laser-cut
plywood was brightly printed and the tower came
along with its own furniture (also part of the design
collaboration). Atop the tower was a domestic-scaled
room with a pair of seats facing each other, the
whole assembly looking askance at the street so that
the structure resembled a kind of periscope, poking
4 Architecture Paper #3
left: below:
Assemble: Assemble:
Folly for a Flyover, 2011 The Cineroleum, 2010
Photo: David Vitner, 2011 Photo: Morley Vim Sternberg, 2010
up above the parapet of the courtyard wall. The
intention was to question the nature, scale, use and
permanence of public space. Its memory has
transformed an unexceptional piece of empty space
so that it has become impossible now to see that
yard as other than a space of architectural potential.
Hairywood became a touchpoint for many of the
pop-ups which followed it.
Assemble
The Cineroleum, 2010
Perhaps the richest and almost certainly the most
theatrical of pop-up’s successes was the conversion
of a defunct Clerkenwell petrol station into a cinema
for a short summer season in 2010. Assemble, who
had met whilst studying architecture at Cambridge,
gathered together an assortment of discarded cinema
seating, with all its velvet and the industrialised detail
of entertainment, and cobbled together impressive
new tiers of seating based on the proportions of the
historic salvaged chairs. The walls were formed by an
intricate system of rigging, creating rouched Tyvek
cladding which was lowered to create the container
during screenings and raised before and after the films
were shown. A café was set up in the old shopfront,
using salvaged elements and ingeniously produced
bespoke furniture.
The effect of lowering and raising the ‘curtains’
was electrifyingly dramatic, creating a theatrical and
intriguing structure which was a huge success and
a massive boon to the idea of pop-up architecture.
The building was not without its faults. Its siting
on the Clerkenwell Road made it a noisy choice
of venue – and one which the fabric walls did not
address. Also the Cineroleum did raise one of the key

critiques of the pop-up phenomenon – which is that
this is a hobby for affluent young students who are
able to support themselves whilst spending time on
a project like this (a debate related to that over unpaid
internships). The criticism is unlikely to go away but
it is not enough to invalidate the work of these
designers. Perhaps they rather should be acclaimed
for their attitude to the physical labour involved
in constructing buildings which give real pleasure in
a very public way. Assemble also created the extremely
successful and transformative Folly for a Flyover in
the following year, an installation including a café and
small raked auditorium using an architecturally
striking construction in an archetypally leftover urban
space beneath a Hackney overpass, a project which
revealed the potential in even the most unpromising
of urban spaces.
Haworth Tompkins
The Shed, 2013
The found space has become such a fundamental
typology in contemporary theatre that traditional, fixed
venues have been experimenting with ad hoc architec-
ture to allow themselves a little of the flexibility and
urgency of the temporary venue. Among the British
pioneers are Haworth Tompkins, whose temporary
theatre for the Almeida at a disused Kings Cross bus
garage (2001) has been lauded as one of the most
intense and theatrical performance spaces of recent
years. Even their work at London’s Young Vic allowed
the institution to maintain its course, as found aesthetic,
to feel like a place in constant flux. In the midst of
a £70m reworking of the National Theatre, Haworth
Tompkins’ 250 seat Shed gives the institution some
of that room to experiment with a more intimate space.
left:
Haworth Tompkins:
The Shed, 2013
Photo: Helene Binet, 2013
Its curious form seems to contain echoes of every-
thing from Battersea Power Station to the concrete
shuttering inscribed in the fabric of the South Bank’s
sculptural architecture. It is also an enigmatic object,
a kind of signpost which reinvigorates an awkward
series of public spaces. Sometimes, a space needs
something in it for a while so that the space itself is
noticed, the Shed seems to be one of these instances.
It is built using the temporary materials of theatre
construction rather than the more traditional stuff
of architecture. Productions put on at the Shed seem
to buzz with more intensity than those in the more
bourgeois and comfortable surroundings of the
permanent venues. Its difference is in its juxtaposition.
Theatre has proved a fruitful ground for the pop-up,
an arena with a crossover of building and improvisa-
tional cultures where set-building and architecture
come together. The Theatre on the Fly at the Chichester
Festival (2012) by Assemble and the Yard Theatre
by Practice Architecture (in Hackney Wick, 2011,
using materials left over from the Olympics construction
sites) were both thoughtful, if not always entirely
successful examples.
Carmody Groarke
Studio East Dining, 2010
Sited atop a multi-storey car park overlooking what
was still then the Olympics construction site, Studio
East Dining proved one of the most theatrical and
memorable opportunities for dining in a city which
thrives on novelty. Virtually all the materials for the
roof-top restaurant were left over from the Olympics
sites; scaffolding poles, bolts and boards, construction
lights – even the long, communal tables were
planed down from scaffolding boards. The structure,
November 2013 5
 top left and below:
Carmody Groarke:
Studio East Dining,
2010
Photos: Luke Hayes, 2010

bottom:
Richard Wentworth
and Gruppe:
Black Maria, 2013
Photo: Richard Wentworth, 2013

6 Architecture Paper #3
 left:
Richard Wentworth
and Gruppe:
Black Maria, 2013
Photo: Richard Wentworth, 2013

a multi-armed, asymmetrical star-shape, was then
shrink wrapped in a membrane of heat-retractable
polyethelene to create a translucent cladding which
appeared to glow after dark like a paper lantern.
All building materials were able to be recycled after
the restaurant was dismantled giving it an extraordi-
narily low carbon footprint – something pop-up
architecture generally does not perhaps get enough
credit for. With 140 covers, each arm of the star was
aimed at a strategic view across the city. Carmody
Groarke was also responsible for the 2008 Skywalk,
a snaking, black-painted timber pop-up walkway
which radically redefined the use of a rather neglected
piece of public space in Montague Place outside
the British Museum. Built as the centrepiece for the
London Festival of Architecture it became a very
effective demonstration of how a pop-up structure
can re-animate the public ream in reality and
imagination.
object sitting in an awesome post-industrial space.
It proved a success in creating an atmosphere and
allowing events to congeal in and around it but
perhaps had it have been on site a little longer would
have grown into a more fully realised space. Gruppe
teach with Tom Emerson at the ETH in Zurich and are
a collective including architects as well as carpenters
so this was a more finely executed structure than might
often be the case in pop-up construction.
Richard Wentworth has been a formative influence
on this particular area, on the work of Emerson’s
practice 6a and his exhibition An Area of Outstanding
Unnatural Beauty (with Artangel, 2002) was instru-
mental in tying together architecture and installation
in order to better understand the nature and character
of a particular place, a proto pop-up art work.

Richard Wentworth and Gruppe

Black Maria, 2013

If most pop-ups exist to address left-over spaces in

cities, Black Maria represented an attempt to create
an intimacy within the vast lobby of the converted
granary which now houses Central St Martin’s.
The artist Richard Wentworth worked with
architectural collective Gruppe (Nicholas Lobo
Brennan, Christoph Junk and Boris Grusic) to craft
a kind of amphitheatre intended to intensify the
entrance space and, in Wentworth’s words “to create
a place where anything could happen”. Constructed
in timber in an echo of the Black Maria structure
built by Thomas Edison as the world’s first combined
film studio and cinema (1893), this was a finely crafted

November 2013 7
ADF Papers:
ADF Papers explore new
directions in British architecture,
design and fashion.
They are available online
at Back of the Envelope blog
www.britishcouncil.org/
backoftheenvelope.
ADF Papers are published by
the British Council’s Architecture,
Design, Fashion department;
designed by objectif, and printed
on Colorplan paper by GF Smith.
The British Council is the UK’s
international organisation for
cultural relations. In the Architecture,
Design, Fashion department
we develop exhibitions, events and
collaborations linking designers
and cultural institutions around
the world.
Cover illustration:
Author:
Edwin Heathcote is an architect,
designer and writer living and
working in London. He has been
the architecture and design critic
of The Financial Times since 1999
and is the author of over a dozen
books including, most recently
The Meaning of Home. In 2001
Heathcote founded the hardware
manufacturing company izé.
He is a trustee of Open City and
the Blood Mountain Foundation
and is on the Editorial boards
of Architectural Design and Icon.
Detail from Richard
Wentworth and
Gruppe: Black Maria,
2013
Photo: David Grandorge, 2013
Links:
Serpentine Gallery
serpentinegallery.org
6a architects
www.6a.co.uk
Eley Kishimoto
www.eleykishimoto.com
Assemble
assemblestudio.co.uk
Carmody Groarke
www.carmodygroarke.com
Richard Wentworth
www.lissongallery.com/artists/
richard-wentworth
Gruppe
www.gruppe.cx
Haworth Tompkins
www.haworthtompkins.com
The Architecture Foundation
www.architecturefoundation.org.uk
Further Reading:
The Temporary City, Peter Bishop
and Lesley Williams (Routledge,
2012)
Urban Catalyst: The Power of
Temporary Use, Philipp Oswalt,
Klaus Overmeyer and Philipp
Misselwitz (DOM Publishers, 2013)
‘Architects who improvise and
innovate’, Edwin Heathcote
(Financial Times, 23 August 2013)