The first public project by student architects Chris Dove and Craig Mitchell sits in the City of London in exalted company. Their Portland limestone bench, unveiled last month (24 October) sits on the corner of Foster Lane and Cheapside among the work of Jean Nouvel, Christopher Wren, Eric Parry and Thomas Heatherwick.
It is there because they were the winners of a competition jointly organised by the City of London, the Masons’ Livery Company, quarry company Albion Stone and masonry specialists CWO.
Student architects are invited to design a bench for a given location within the square mile and the winning project is made by CWO using Portland limestone supplied by Albion.
It is not just the architectural students who are learning about stone, either, because they work with apprentice masons at CWO. For the masons the competition represents an opportunity to gain experience of working directly with architects.
Ed Shaw and Sam Elgar, who both studied stonemasonry at Weymouth College, led the team working with Chris Dove and Craig Mitchell, students of John Moores University in Liverpool. Other student masons involved in the project as guests were Jake Potter, Martin Holmes, Jack Herniman and Toby Robson.
The winning design used 10 pieces of Grove Whitbed Portland limestone that form a bench 6.5m long. Apart for the sheer size of stones weighing up to 2tonnes, perfecting the ramp and twist desired by the architects required some careful setting out and making of zinc templates, Ed Shaw told NSS when the bench was unveiled by the Sheriff of the City of London, Jeffrey Evans (to watch a video of the unveiling click here).
This is the third bench to have been installed in the City of London as a result of this competition, which was inaugurated five years ago.
The aim of it is to encourage architects to think about specifying stone in their designs and to gain first hand experience of using it.
The winners visit the quarry to see the stone being extracted and work with the masons on the execution and installation of their winning design.
After the unveiling on 24 October the two students, who were at Liverpool John Moores University when they entered the competition, gave an excellent presentation in nearby Wax Chandlers Hall about the design, making and fixing of the bench.
Chris Dove said: "You come to site and actually see the hole in the ground… the foundations… and it's actually happening. For a student of architecture to go from a sketch, a range of nice little photographs, to something that's actually live… it's something we're immensley proud of and thankful for the whole competition for enabling us to do it."
He said it had been educational to see the stone being extracted and worked and it had made him think about the "materiality" of stone, "which is something that, as architects, you feel disconnected from – the material side of things".