Alice Dietsch of AL_A, whose library archives the story of each project

Buildings.

AL_A is housed in a former road transport depot, near the site of the old Caledonian Market and approximately above the tunnelled rail line north from London’s King’s Cross station. Amanda Levete and her team fitted out the building, designing their own storage furniture, and moved here in 2012. Fifty-strong, they work in the top-lit shed, accessed from the street via blue steel gates and a concrete-coffer-roofed courtyard that was a loading bay, now with a row of bike racks hung on one wall. On entering the generous space everyone, clients included, removes their shoes. A wall-to-wall zingy scarlet carpet creates a softer acoustic and lends a pink hue to some of the many white surfaces.

Research takes time, it’s an investment.”

In the far corner of the space a large table covered in an array of samples forms the main materials area, “the museum of trial-and-errors”, some of them spilling over onto the floor and other nearby surfaces. There are many models scattered around the room, including different iterations of the V&A Exhibition Road Quarter, MAAT –the Lisbon Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology – and the Central Embassy shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok.

In the two-storey front section of the building more samples are on shelves in a corridor alongside the kitchen. Upstairs is the workshop, whose location removes noise from the office space.

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Would you call what you have a materials library?

No – I think our library is very much a research table with, as you see, a lot of trial-and-errors. It’s very important that we keep talking as an office and that it’s all here on display. People get curious, ask others about a sample, it generates an idea on something else that you’re working on. They end up talking to the right people in the office and see why this a particular product was good, what it did, what it cannot do – that’s very much how we work – it’s really a question of research. It’s very much an archive too of the story of the project and the research that went on behind the project and everything that failed too!

We don’t really have a library as such, that’s not the way we work. We tend to keep all the material for each project, then save it as a record. It’s like an archive, rather than a live thing.

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But anyone can go and root about in a box?

Yes, but what’s quite interesting is the way that we explore materiality, which cross-pollinates projects. So it’s no coincidence that we were working with ceramics on two or three projects at the same time and ended up with very different results. We’re now experimenting quite a lot with glass and that is starting to generate ideas on other projects. It’s quite nice how our research feeds into other projects that are trying to achieve different things with the same material.

Does the potential for the development of materials and forms with computing and 3D printers mean that for some architects a materials library is no longer just samples from manufacturers?

It depends on the type of work you do. We bring in a lot of manufacturers to do CPDs on materials and they sometimes find they get the weirdest questions from us! That keeps us up-to-date with what’s going on in a more active way than to have a library with samples and catalogues.

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How else do people research materials in the office?

Sometimes they come across things by accident. We have a genuine interest in materials so we read a lot – say about aluminium, and we try to share that knowledge. Some partners keep up with the latest advances, so that’s also how we progress, working with manufacturers, such as Cumella and Tichelaar. Then it’s easier for us because they know what we are trying to achieve, what sort of aesthetic we are looking for, which is easier than always starting from scratch.

Within the practice there are quite a few people who are especially interested in materials, who look out for things and reading the right magazines, newspapers and news – so they tend to lead those that conversations. Model-making is slightly different – to us it’s about exploring concepts. Sometimes we make models that speak about the materiality but they usually work in parallel with the material.

Research takes time, it’s an investment. At the moment we are thinking about making a large tapestry but where do you start? There’s no catalogue. We won the commission for extending Paisley Museum in Scotland, so we did some research into textiles and weaving. If you start from there you end up finding the right individuals.

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Tile for the V&A Exhibition Road Quarter courtyard

“We undertook a two-and a half year research project to make the floor in porcelain. We worked with Royal Tichelaar Makkum, the oldest manufacturer of porcelain in the Netherlands.”

“When Tichelaar came with its tile, the finesse was very different to what could be produced in Spain and Portugal. For the tiles that are half glazed and half matt, they covered half of the tile by hand, and then sprayed the glaze so there was an element of man-made. The principle of the tiles is to start with a rectangle or a rhomboid, and then with the abstract diagonal line you blur the tile itself, so that together it starts to read as a field. We had computers to work out the pattern and every time we changed the geometry of the roof, such as for structural reasons, then the script for the pattern of the courtyard would change too, so the relationship between the two was symbiotic.”

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Experimenting with routing and colouring the V&A tiles(optional)

“We’ve done tests with different companies to find the best technique to do a drawing, which would be not only on the surface but also embedded in the tile; and would last yet would still have those qualities of shiny and matt. We tried to find a more cost-effective way to rout the tiles, to create the motif of line, but these attempts were not very successful. The first one that Tichelaar made was by simply inking the clay while it was still fresh.”

“One of the main areas of research that ran in parallel to the aesthetic was the technical evaluation, in trying to develop a tile that would pass all the tests – slip-resistance in dry and wet conditions, impact- and stain-resistance. We ended up developing a new specification for the porcelain. We added molocite, which is naturally present in porcelain and makes it hard, but we added a bit more to make it more grainy.”

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Final tile form, with a test glaze, for the Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, on the bank of the River Tagus

“It was at the same time as the V&A so we were still preoccupied with ceramics and porcelain. We designed a ceramic tile with a geometry that picks up the light and the reflections of the water in different ways.”

“Here we are really playing with the natural material and a glaze that is almost translucent, trying to make something a bit high-tech with an ancient technique, which is something of an obsession with our product design. The tiles are all the same size, apart from the ones at the bottom of the building which are flat, then they change slightly in the first tiers. With the curve of the building the shadow gets smaller or bigger and the relief gets accentuated, and the shadows of course change with the time of day. These were produced in Spain by Cumella.”

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Transitional mosaic floor for the new entrance to the V&A

“We needed to make four rooms into one big space, so as to form a proper entrance. The room at the back had a mosaic floor,but all the new entrance area was parquet. Later we lifted that up and made a floor that tried to unify the adjoining rooms, but keeping the idea of the border that is present everywhere in the V&A. The pattern is loosely derived from that om the courtyard, to make a relationship there. It really speaks of the old and new coming together and I think it works brilliantly. A collective of women was set up in Italy set just for the V&A project. There was so much time pressure on site, so the mosaic was made on a mesh and rolled up, and unrolled on site and the terrazzo poured in to set the mosaic. We had big one-to-one drawings with the mesh placed on top, the mosaic came in three colours so they were placing it by hand, like making a jigsaw with the cheat sheet underneath it!”

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Material samples for the gates to the V&A courtyard

“The first move of the project was to open up Aston Webb’s screen, as a response to the part-pedestrianisation of Exhibition Road, to let people flow, to create a more informal entrance. The irony was in succeeding with English Heritage to open it up, then we had to close it at night!”

“The clue for the design of the gate came from the survey drawing of the screen and its shrapnel damage, which was almost topographic. The gates are a thick aluminium plate which we drilled in order to achieve transparency from the street and which memorialises the pattern of the shrapnel damage. This brings narrative into the design, which is very important for us.”

“We tested the angle of perforation to see what would work best, trying to get the right alloy, and then the right finish in terms of the polish and the anodising of the gates. We worked with Midland Alloy, who make a lot of components in aluminium for cars, including Aston Martin. They got quite excited by the project and fortunately they had a big bed to drill the holes with CNC, which is quite unique, and they were able to make each gate in one piece.”

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“This is an experiment that we’ve done with Corian. You need a mould to thermoform the Corian to give it the shape you want and here we’ve experimented with a mould that will be a jig that moves, that is adjustable. It’s like a piano with an axis in the middle, but all the keys of the piano can be adjusted, so they can go to and fro and at an angle as well, giving a sort of wave geometry. That was controlled by a computer programme and fixed in position to mould each one of the blades. It shows that we think about material, not only the way it feels and looks and the technical performance, but also how it is made, what is the process to get to the final product.”

“The beauty with Corian is that you can make any shape, so you want to benefit from that and at the same time have something that is cost-effective, so you don’t have the cost of the mould every time you make a tile.”

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“While we were doing research for the V&A we went to Limoges, where there are a lot of companies that are working with high-tech ceramics for the aeronautics industry. In discussing the performance of the clay, they steered us towards a company that was doing very high-tech ceramic – it doesn’t change, it doesn’t expand, it doesn’t contract, it’s very stable material. It is used for satellites and in the medical industries for hips and joints. We thought we could make an ‘impossible’ table, because it would be so thin and look so fragile and brittle.”

“We also wanted a narrative that would marry to history and tradition, to apply a really ancient glaze to a really high-tech ceramic and bridge the two. They had never glazed a piece of high-tech ceramic and thought we were mad but understood it could lead to something else. We tried to get the glaze to stick to a high-tech ceramic, then we made a table but it started to move, even in the kiln, then version three came out with straight legs but it started to collapse in the kiln when it was reheated with the glaze, so… a disaster, but it was such a beautiful piece. Then the next one also didn’t work, but the final one is as good as we could get.”