River Gipping
During 1791, when the Trustees were negotiating with John Rennie, they had asked him to assess an extension of the navigation from Stowmarket to the River Lark at Bury St Edmunds, but this was not pursued. With the navigation thriving, there were two proposals for canals from Ipswich to Eye, Suffolk in 1819. A meeting was held in January at Eye, which was chaired by Charles Cornwallis, 2nd Marquess Cornwallis. It considered two reports, one proposed by the civil engineer William Cubitt, which involved a tunnel through the hills at Mendlesham, with the estimated cost exceeding £100,000, and another, for a canal over the hills, costing £80,000. Both were thought to be too expensive to implement, but a third proposal emerged, for an extension from the River Gipping at Needham Market, which would follow the valley of a tributary through Creeting St Mary to Earl Stonham, where a basin would be built beside the turnpike road (now the A140 road). This would enable waggons to make a round trip from Eye in a single day, rather than the two days that a trip to Ipswich took. The scheme was estimated to cost £12,000, and shares in it were offered at the meeting. Although many were taken up, the scheme did not advance any further.
Gordon Kipping
Kipping is a native of Toronto, Ontario who has been living and working in New York City since 1995. Upon completing a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in engineering in 1989 at the University of Toronto, Gordon Kipping worked as a mechanical engineer in building services, eventually attaining licensure as a Professional Engineer in 1993. In 1991, he returned to school to study architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture where he received a Master of Architecture degree in 1995. Since graduation, Gordon Kipping has worked for the offices of Philip Johnson, Greg Lynn, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Davis Brody Bond. Coinciding with his employment in architectural offices, Kipping produced conceptual and built work under the name G TECTS. As G TECTS, he had a solo exhibition at StoreFront For Art and Architecture entitled Residual Urban Site Strategies, (1998) and authored a book entitled Ordinary Diagrams: Electronic Information Technologies and Architecture, (1995 & 1997). The book was cited in the Terence Riley essay The Un-Private House accompanying the Museum of Modern Art show of the same name. Comparisons were drawn between the over-exposure produced by glass in the Mies van der Rohe Farnsworth House and the similar effect in a G TECTS proposed house as facilitated by electronic information technologies. The book and a print edition of its final plate Entity as Information Zoom are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and were on display in the exhibition Cut ‘n’ Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City.
One of Kipping's most notable and published projects is the Tribeca Issey Miyake store he designed in cooperation with Frank Gehry. Kipping said he tried to ‘push accepted norms into new places.’ with this project which was completed in 2001. The shop occupies three floors of a restored 1888 warehouse on Hudson Street, with gridded stainless steel walls and diagonally striped glass floors.
In 2016, G TECTS was selected by the New York City Department of Design and Construction to be part of their Design Excellence program, shortlisting them for public projects in New York. Kipping has an extensive client list that includes Issey Miyake, The National Jazz Museum of Harlem, Lincoln Center, Forest City Ratner, City University of New York and the New York City Department of Design and Construction.