Quantum leap: David Chipperfield's studio for sculptor Antony Gormley.

It didn't take Gormley and Chipperfield long to establish that a modified industrial shed would be a woefully inadequate solution for the 1994 Turner Prize-winning sculptor's new studio. Having outgrown his gritty Peckham studio--a former laundry converted by Eric Parry in 1988--Gormley's need to move was more than a notch up in scale and location (building three and a half times more space within easier reach of his north London home). The need to find a site, commission an architect and collaborate on the design of a purpose-built studio reflected the fact that, like it or not, for artists like Gormley, art has increasingly become a professional practice. Servicing, deliveries, storage, stocktaking and databases are now all part of the process, as are dare I say, health and safety and quality control. Gormley needed a functional, maintenance-free, robust building, with more space to work, and significantly, more space to think.

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Understanding Gormley's working methods, Chipperfield's team knew that this building would be tested to destruction. With forklift trucks, welding gear and beam cranes, Gormley would work this structure hard, and unlike many clients, he impressed the architects with his intuitive understanding of forces, mass, and material. 'What are the engineer's safety factors?' he would ask while scrutinizing working drawings, setting stringent performance specifications for suspension capacity, impact resistance and point loads across the entire site (including the external yard and cantilevered stair landing). Gormley has long admired Chipperfield's work, discovering it for himself while diligently searching through RIBA files for a suitable architect to convert his own home in 1989. Noting a strength that surpasses the 'up-yours brutalism' of the '60s and '70s, and an ability to make established forms of Modernism more logical, Chipperfield's manipulation of materials, light and form had clearly impressed him. For Gormley, therefore, whose work is fundamentally based on the human figure, aside from setting finite performance targets, the spatial demands of scale and proportion were of equal significance. As a place in which to contemplate the form of his work, the volumes had to be right.

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While Gormley stresses that this is a factory, not a trophy building, the design has to transcend utilitarianism, and the team were keen to engage in a philosophical exploration of a building that would be part gallery and part shed. Reconsidering industrial typologies, they investigated how to blur conceptual boundaries, and after six or seven prototype designs (including a Marfa-esque barrel-vaulted option), the repeated-bay pitched-roof scheme emerged. Mimicking the proportion of his former studio, but increasing its dimensions and replicating it seven times, Gormley was comfortable with the scale that he associates with a Georgian house. Reworking the Victorian roof typology minimizes distracting views, while providing excellent daylighting and flexible hanging space throughout. The seven bays are broken down into double- and single-height volumes centred on the principal three-bay studio. Functions are then carefully disposed, with private studios intentionally remote, separated from shared spaces by two external staircases; graceful, sculptural objects that slow you down, enforcing pace, ritual, and contemplation. While the ground floor is given over to production--with photography studio, storage and delivery spaces, the principal studio, workshop, studio manager's office and changing rooms--the first floor provides places for private and shared reflection, with two private studios (one each for Gormley and his wife, the painter Vicken Parsons), a resources/meeting room, an office and a generous common room.

The purpose-built studio has afforded Gormley several 'very practical luxuries', such as staff changing rooms, and a designated plaster room where he can create his own body templates without contaminating the studio spaces beyond. The yard is also of critical importance, fully serviced to allow outside work, and having capacity for two articulated lorries.

Pure in form, Chipperfield's tectonic control is seen throughout, with seamless walls and soffits set against the exposed roof structure, while in detail, modest joinery, metal doors and bespoke ironmongery add mass to the building, fabricated from thick plywood and reassuringly weighty 3mm gauge galvanized steel.

Gormley concluded with a reflective question: would his work be affected by his new studio? Work that he has based on architectural illusions: body-as-space and space-as-mass. Perhaps, he speculates, Chipperfield's articulation of volume has influenced his emerging work with variable block sculptures. But, certainly on a practical level, improved daylighting has facilitated more intricate work, and the luxury of space has allowed him to experiment with mock-ups, such as that produced for his latest work 'Clearing'--a wild metallic tumbleweed formed by a 10km length of square section aluminium, currently tracing a sinuous trajectory in London's White Cube Gallery.

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