crown place — Stig Evans

BEST TALL BUILDING EUROPE 2022 WINNER - CTUBH AWARDS

London’s largest Painting - One Crown Place sits on the edge of Londons finance district, adjacent to Liverpool Street Station. KPF Architects commissioned Stig Evans to work on the facade of the 2 buildings. The initial concept for One Crown Place began by observing the environment it would sit in. London has amazing daily variable weather conditions. Architectonic space is continually modified by transformations in light and colour. The visual and spatial shifts produced by changes in environmental conditions can create interesting and fluctuating architectural special variations on a building. John Constable’s cloud studies in the V&A Museum became a good starting point to develop n initial concept for the facades. Constable painted more than 50 cloud studies between 1821 - 1822, working quickly in the open air, often from Hampstead where he lived looking over the City & St Pauls. The backs of the studies have notes of time, colours, wind strength and direction.

Using these and visual observations Stig Evans developed a palette of blues and greys for One Crown Place in the studio, making actual painted swatches, getting the right combination of hues, tones and matching them to real skies. Each façade was treated as an individual canvas and the colour selection process went through many combinations - similar to the process of making a painting, where colours are moved around, selected or discarded until a successful relationship emerged.

The constantly shifting colour and light slide into matching, and then not matching, the colours in the facades, subtly changing the relationship of the building to its space.