In the studio with Stephen Marshall
We sit down with architect and Meanwhile collaborator Stephen Marshall to hear more about his influences, his tips for excellent exterior design, and the key to creating inspiring student accommodation.
lines, swathes of glass panelling, the playful integration of shape and colour, and a harmonious uniting of indoors and out. These are just some of the qualities inherent in the designs of Scottish architect Stephen Marshall and his eponymous, London-based firm, which specialises in high-density residential projects, private homes and light-infused gallery spaces. Stephen Marshall Architects are frequent Meanwhile collaborators and have helped to conjure multiple Scape dwellings. “We focus on the exterior,” Marshall explains of the partnership. “The shape of the buildings, the volumes, the outdoor spaces.”
For Marshall, a day in his Islington studio involves “a lot of time spent on preparing freehand drawings for client or planning reports” and just as much focussing on “admin-type things” because, he says, understanding what’s going on at all levels of the business “filters down into the quality of the final designs.” Here, in a moment of downtime, we caught up with the architect to find out more about his simple but effective approach to design, the influence of his own student-living experience while studying at Harvard, and his desire to infuse spaces with something that makes inhabitants feel special.
What are the driving philosophies behind your practice?
It all starts with what things look like and how they work. People have all these different philosophies, but ours is simple: do a good job, ensure it’s workman-like, make it look amazing. For the Scape student living projects, the starting point has to be: how can we create the best, most exciting space for a young person to be in? Possibly someone coming from a foreign country, which many students are. How can you give them a space and an environment to, first of all, work and study in? And then, when they're not doing that, somewhere that’s a fun place to be. It’s got to be safe and secure too, of course, with a light touch and, from day one, Scape has been very good at making sure that the students have a great experience, while being looked after.
And how do you create spaces for a great experience?
When I was studying in the States, I lived in a dorm called the Cronkite Graduate Centre, built by the family of the late US TV news broadcaster Walter Cronkite. It was frightening, a terrible place physically, but it was full of kids from all different countries – from Brazil, Venezuela. Everyone who went to the [Harvard Graduate] School of Education stayed there, and the amazing people in it were what made it fantastic. I’d always thought it would be very interesting to create a living space that was similar in the sense that it allowed people to come together, but in a way that’s more comfortable, more edgy, more capable of allowing more things to happen. And that's really what all the Scape student projects are about.
And how do you achieve that in terms of exterior design?
A lot of it depends on the site. Scape Shoreditch, for instance, is about the street. It’s a very strong design that’s centred on two rows of bedrooms, and we didn’t need to do too much work building a great external environment because it’s in the middle of Shoreditch. Scape Aungier Street is built on a historic site in the middle of Dublin, overlooking the castle, so it has this huge heritage. With that kind of scheme, you're working from the townscape in, always trying to maximise the number of rooms without compromising on comfort. Scape Guildford, on the other hand, was a big open site, so we had to generate an environment, to make the space outside the buildings work. For that, and Scape Canada Water, we created big gardens, while Aungier Street has a courtyard with a garden in the middle of it. We’re always trying to create some sort of outside space.
How do you hope people will feel when occupying the spaces you’ve designed?
Well, half the time, you rather hope they're not thinking about the building at all, frankly! It's a bit like what John Poulson says: you don't want anything in the picture that is too foreground, that’s asking for too much attention, when it hasn’t really earned it. So quite a bit of the building should just create a nice atmosphere – with windows that get sun, for example, that give good views, that have window seats with cushions – and then you might have a flourish here and there, like the spiral staircase that links the Aungier Street common room to the street level.
How do you maximise on space when you're factoring in a lot of rooms?
Lighting’s important. We work with lighting designers to create dramatic, whole-wall lighting schemes that can hugely increase the sense of space. And we always use a lot of glass. There are all sorts of other tricks, too. If you use the same furniture on the exterior as you have on the interior – cushions are good – and if you paint the walls of the courtyard the same colours you have on the interior, you don't know if it's an outside or an inside space. It blurs the edges and makes the space look huge.
What are some of your favourite landscaping strategies?
We like pools of water for movement, sound and reflection. And we use walls and courtyards a lot. Ground lighting too. If you light all the trees from the ground it looks very special. Actually, that’s one thing I think we do in terms of the feelings we try to generate: we want to create spaces that make people feel special, which is not something you associate with most student housing. But people pay so much to study these days, to live in cities and we want to make spaces that make them feel like they’ve made the best choice possible.
Where do you look for inspiration?
I have a very carefully chosen list of magazines that I get from around the world. They’re mainly American and Japanese. I don’t travel abroad very much any more but I know exactly what's happening in Kuala Lumpur at the moment, for instance, and that there’s an amazing building happening in Caracas, Venezuela. I could say nature and trees but, actually, you've got to get to a really interesting image very quickly, and magazines are great for generating ideas.