Described by Marc Quinn as his ‘laboratory’, the design for the artist’s studio explores the concept of flexibility. 

Located within the Shoreditch conservation area this conversion of an industrial workshop to an artist studio consists of a main gallery/studio space with skylight above and access to the street. Smaller adaptable studio spaces incorporate an office, kitchenette, bathroom and storage, all concealed behind large, white sliding doors.

A spine divides the space into two with a small bathroom on the more domestic side and the wet room and plant room facing the studio proper.

The brief was for a highly serviced studio, where the artist’s family could spend time and which could become a showroom for clients, too. The technical requirements were equally challenging, as the floor had to be able to take extra heavy sculptures and the ventilation system capable to extract the toxic chemicals needed to stabilise his sculptures.

“Quinn’s studio is white-walled, with a glass roof and mysterious sliding doors that might just as well conceal flowers frozen in liquid silicone as any raw material, including blood, DNA samples or even human faeces.  Desks run down the centre of the studio, while old leather settees and a coffee table suggest that you could be in a Hoxton bar, except that the purring phones are not all mobiles, and there’s a machine gathering messages.  Perhaps we’re in one of those minimalists architect’s dream houses laid bare in Taschen’s latest volume of fleshless domestic porn. But what about the walls?  Rainbow watercolours and vivid flower paintings-by-numbers, nude photographs and line drawings.” Art Review, February 2002