Many of the structures Carmody Groarke has built over the last five years have been temporary and experimental projects.

He was billed as a ‘starchitect’ when he came to speak in Dublin recently – but it seems that’s less a plaudit and more an insult to Andy Groarke.

“To be honest, there’s enough to concern ourselves with the 35 or so projects that we’ve got on at the moment than to be worrying about what people are saying about us,” he said. “We spend our time working on our projects and making those as good as we can rather than thinking what project is going to further our reputation.”

Groarke is one half of London architectural practice Carmody Groarke, which he formed with Australian Kevin Carmody in 2006, after meeting as colleagues at David Chipperfield Architects.

Two of the firm’s early clients were in Limerick, so the duo were in Ireland every week for two years at one point.

The partnership got a lot more attention when it was selected to design the memorial for the July 7 bombings in London. It won, Groarke said, after taking a gamble. The architects didn’t put forward a shape for the memorial – rather, they proposed a process which would lead to one.

“We met with the families once every fortnight for 18 months, and debated issues of site and identity. It was incredibly emotionally tense throughout,” he said.

Groarke’s philosophy of remembrance is utterly straightforward: “Fundamentally,” he said, “the responsibility of a memorial is to stop people forgetting”. The result is fairly nondescript from a distance: a collection of poles sticking out of a field. To get the memorial, you have to stand amongst it, where you can feel the rough-cast columns of stainless steel and read the names of the dead.

Groarke said the experience of working with the July 7 families had a profound impact on the way he did business. “It changed the way we thought of how we act as professionals with clients, and how empathy should be one of our roles,” he said.

“[Architecture] can improve the quality of people’s lives, and that should be the intention of every building. Architecture is at the mercy of financial algorithms, the ebb and flow of cycles. When things are going well, architects build a lot, or design a lot.

“When we have recessions, they’re interesting pause points where we think ‘we can build, but should we build?’ or ‘if we build like that, what’s it going to do’ and the recession gave us opportunities where not much was being built. What little was being built kind of tested places in interesting ways.”

Many of the structures that Carmody Groarke has built over the last five years have been temporary and experimental projects.

Building for short lifespans, using everything from scaffolding to Portakabins, seems to have drawn out the pair’s ambitious streak.

Take Studio East Dining, for instance. In 2010, there was an opportunity to build on the top floor of a half-built car park overlooking one of the world’s largest construction sites – the London Olympics site. Their client wanted an 800 square metre marquee. They got something boldly different.

“We claimed that for the same budget, we could deliver a much more charged space, aggregated from converging blocks. Its overall form was this relationship between spaces with very particular views over the site.”

Carmody Groarke had just ten weeks to build Studio East Dining from scaffolding, plastic wrap and borrowed materials from the neighbouring works. When the venue opened, diners had to be escorted en masse through the building site to get to their tables.

It was a similar scenario in King’s Cross, where they turned a vacant petrol station wedged between a busy road and a gloomy canal into a restaurant and nightspot. Groarke’s boast was that, with all the hipsters keeping an eye on the canal, anti-social behaviour there dried up, and canal boats returned to moor nearby again.

The firm’s largest public project to date is the Windermere Steamboat Museum in the Lake District, built to house a collection of vintage lake boats and provide space for restoration work.

Much like their Studio East Dining project, the plan for the museum divides the space required into a collection of structures which frame views of the landscape and channel the flow of visitors.

By ditching the idea of one grand structure, the spaces needed for the museum should nestle comfortably into the landscape, matching the scale structures on local farms, rather than dominating the area.

Property Plus, The Sunday Business Post, 31 May 2015