This studio for the English artist Antony Gormley is located amid the industrial buildings, warehouses and rail yards just north of London’s Kings Cross station. Attempting to create light and open spaces for the diverse and specific ways in which the artist works, the building provides studio space for drawing, painting, sculpting, welding, casting, and photography.

A former Turner prize winner, and an artist whose work has been exhibited in museums and as installations all over the world, Antony Gormley has created some of the most ambitious and recognisable sculptural works of the past two decades, including Field, The Angel of the North, and Quantum Cloud on the river Thames in Greenwich. With the increasing interest in his work, Antony Gormley required a space that would be large enough to construct his often huge installations, yet at the same time would also be somewhere intimate and personal enough in which he could conceive his next artistic projects.

Looking to satisfy both of these requirements, the design of the studio references and abstracts the large scale industrial architectural vernacular of the surrounding buildings. The building is distinguished by the silhouette of its pitched roofs and its bright but even interior light. Located to the rear of its site, the studio building itself is approached across a large yard, left open for the assembing of bigger pieces. A pair of galvanised steel staircases connects this yard to the domestic-scale studio and office areas on the upper floor.

Operating as both a workshop and as a pared down, white-walled studio space, the building is the focus for all of Gormley’s artistic production, and sensitively yet pragmatically edifies a collaborative effort between artist and architect.

Client: Antony Gormley
Gross Floor Area: 1,000 m2
Design Architect: David Chipperfield Architects

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