Twentieth Century Society (C20 Society) has submitted a listing application for the former office and studio of David Chipperfield Architects in Camden, North London. Agar Grove studios, also known as 1 Cobham Mews, was the practice’s first building in the UK and, should the application be successful, would be David Chipperfield Architects’ first nationally listed building. The C20 Society bid states that the project, which completed in 1989, “combines influences from Le Corbusian-style modernism and traditional Japanese architecture, inducing an atmosphere of calm and abstraction from context.”
Catherine Croft, Director of C20 Society stated: “Before the Neues Museum and the Hepworth Wakefield, before the Pritzker Prize, there was 1 Cobham Mews. In this modest, modernist ‘backlands’ project, we can see early evidence of the rigour and meticulous attention to detail that would later become hallmarks of David Chipperfield’s work. Historic England’s listing guidance for residential buildings recommends ‘particular credit where architects are designing for themselves’. We’d contend that this also applies to architects places of work, where the intimacy of the working environment and the values of the practice are manifest.”