Crystal Structure (private ownership)
Year Completed : 1974
Size : 1.2m x 2.1m (4ft x 7ft)
Client : Bradford & Bingley Building Society
Location : Building Society Offices in Sutton, Greater London area
Current Status : Purchased from a second hand shop many years ago. It is currently in private hands as of January 2023. As this is in private hands the map location pin is loosely placed over Cawood.
For their Sutton Offices, the architect was keen to have a more abstract approach so we based this design on a crystal structure. Pools of melted class form in some of the crystals and others are made up of facetted or textured ceramic. Whilst the image had abstract qualities we thought that the joining together of many different crystals to make a whole mass could be seen to represent the structure of a building society. We obtained the reference from our 9th edition Encyclopaedia Britannica. This source still had beautiful line engravings which helped to formalize the crystal structure. Even if these old volumes contained photographs of crystals, these would have been much less useful. When researching, we often used to find help from this source.
Lat/Long : 53.832980, -1.129600
Mural still exists but can't easily be seen due to resticted access to the site |