The first volume of Caruso St John's Collected Works is published this month by Mack Books. The publication covers the first fifteen years of Adam Caruso and Peter St John's partnership, following a thematic course shaped around key phases and aspects of their thinking, and offering a detailed reflection on the practice’s activities between 1990 and 2005. Through a chorus of voices including critics, clients, and artists, it narrates Caruso St John's early emergence and development through to the international recognition which came with projects such as Nottingham Contemporary, the New Art Gallery Walsall, and the Brick House.
Detailed accounts of early projects and competition entries, with unseen drawings and new commentaries by Adam Caruso and Peter St John, are presented here accompanied and contextualised by inventories of references from across architecture and contemporary art, together with new and archival texts capturing each project’s formation and reception. With an open and reflexive structure, the book offers both an accessible introduction and a detailed, cross-referential constellation of ideas, images, influences, and documentation. Diverse projects such as the progressive reiterations of Peter St John’s home at Orleston Mews and the signage system for London’s Bankside sit in dialogue with more well-known buildings. Bringing together the renowned and the minor, the peripheral and the spectacular, the ugly and the beautiful, this essential book – the first comprehensive monograph on the practice – embodies Caruso St John’s belief that the contemporary world is composed not solely of the new but of everything that has come before. It illuminates a vision of the built environment as a network of culture, memory, construction, and emotion, and articulates an architecture that inhabits and evolves with that fluctuating whole. Includes texts by Wim Wenders, Hans Kolhoff, Irénée Scalbert, Vicky Richardson, Claes Caldenby, Dominique Boudet, James Lingwood, Adam Caruso, Peter St John, and more.
Images © Caruso St John and Mack Books.
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Casabella issue 940 features a review Caruso St John's Complete Works, Volume I, published by Mack Books. Federico Tranfa commends the book's thematic collation of projects, found texts and commentaries, stating it is a 'courageous way to come to terms with the past, because it is not analysed a posteriori, but instead with the cultural context of the epoch of pertinence'.
Edmund Fowles, director of Feilden Fowles Architects, reviews Caruso St John's monograph published by Mack books. Discussing the books openness, he praises the presentation of projects and references alongside commentaries, a 'constellation of culture, memory, construction and emotion'.
Sofie De Caigny, director of the Flanders Architecture Institute, reviewed Caruso St John's Collected Works: Volume I for Drawing Matter. She discusses the book's choice to submerge the reader into the cultural sphere of the end of the 20th century, through contemporary texts, lectures and references.
Book launch, London
Caruso St John: Collected Works
Volume 1, 1990–2005
AA Bookshop, London
18:00 19th October 2022
Adam Caruso and Peter St John will celebrate the publication of their Collected Works: Volume 1 1990–2005, by presenting two personal projects from the formative years of their practice; their homes at Swan Yard and Orleston Mews.
Book launch, Zurich
Caruso St John: Collected Works
Volume 1, 1990–2005
Erikastrasse, Zürich
18:00 CET 1st November 2022
Adam Caruso will be in conversation with curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen to celebrate the launch of Caruso St John's Collected Works: Volume 1 1990–2005.
Adam Caruso will be speaking on the theme of ‘Semper and Material Culture’, as part of the book launch for A New Agenda for Gottfried Semper. Alongside Elena Chestnova, Murray Fraser, Michael Gnehm, and Sonja Hildebrand, Adam will discuss the mid-nineteenth century’s emphatic interest in material history against the backdrop of the precariousness of a life in exile confronted with a globalised world.
Caruso St John designed the exhibition stand for Karma International Gallery at the Paris+ art fair. The Zurich based gallery showed a series of sculptures by Hans Josephsohn, among other works, at the first edition of the fair, the French version of Art Basel.
Caruso St John is celebrating the 10th Anniversary of its Zurich office. Established in 2011 by directors Michael Schneider and Florian Zierer as a site office for the practice's mixed-use building on Europaallee, the office has gone on to undertake projects including the Bremer Landesbank Headquarters, the new chancel at St Gallen Cathedral and the headquarters for the St Jakob Foundation, as well as the practice's largest project to date, the Swiss Life Arena.
Caruso St John's Paulaner Housing project in Munich has been awarded the Callwey Award for Neighbourhood Development. The project on the Welfengarten in the Au-Haidhausen district of the city created 390 apartments for both private sale and social tenants, along with a crèche, kindergarten and retail.
Caruso St John's competition models for the Ascona Centre for Tourism and Culture and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux‑Arts Lausanne feature in an exhibition at the Cooper Union, New York.
Exhibition
Sigurd Lewerentz, Architect of Death and Life
Stockholm, Sweden
Open until the 28th August 2022
Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life is in its final weeks at Arkdes. The retrosepctive exhibition was designed by Caruso St John and curated by Kieran Long, Johan Örn and Lena Landerberg.
Caruso St John have four drawings in this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, curated by the artist Alison Wilding under the theme 'Climate'. The exhibition opens on the 21st June.