A Stone’s Throw from Clerkenwell Green
15 Clerkenwell Close has one of those noncommittal London addresses, dry, factual, and betraying almost nothing of what lies behind the front door. Yet behind it is a building so gloriously particular, so perverse in its brilliance, that it could only be the product of long, slow obsession. And it is, fortunately, the kind of obsession I’ve had the pleasure of observing (and photographing) over years of working with its author, Amin Taha & Groupwork
This is not just a house or an office or even an “architect’s own home”. No, this is a manifesto in stone. A radical statement that says architecture, properly done, still matters. Photographing it is less a matter of pointing a camera at an elevation, it’s a serious engagement, illustrating an archaeology of intent.
The building is not picturesque, and thank god for that, it is not trying to be liked. Instead, it sets up a series of visual confrontations. The elevation’s regular grid of stone members (not cladding, real honest-to-god structural limestone) is less façade than exoskeleton, a kind of architectural haiku in quarried mass.
If the building reads like a puzzle in plan, it reads like a film set in section. You descend through the studio space via a metal stair folded like a piece of origami, past a suspended glass box (a meeting room, a familiar Taha gesture), to arrive in a sunken well of light, concrete, and party walls—here preserved, there revealed. The layering of materials, the surprise of each threshold, and the near-constant sense of defying gravity make a point, this is a building you live in with your eyes.
The flats, too, resist obviousness. Walls move, glide, pivot. Oak panels slide and rotate like a child’s puzzle box. The spaces are elemental it seems like light does most of the decorating. What might feel austere elsewhere here has a richer, more human feel, an invitation to celebrate domestic ritual, within a splendid frame.
And then there’s the context—the Abbey that was, the warehouse that followed, the fire, the Marxist lodgers, the (cough) planning officers, and a steady erasure of history by those more comfortable with pastiche than precision. This building is a rebuttal to all that. It occupies the same ground as a Norman monastery and asks: what does it mean to build now, on this land, with this stone?
15 Clerkenwell Close is gloriously unkempt and absolutely serious. It is what happens when an architect trusts the material, the site, their instinct and their, immensely serious, intellect. It’s one of those buildings, a moment in history, that building, important architecture written in stone.
