Níall McLaughlin at POST PRESS (Charlotte Goodhart)

Níall McLaughlin is this year’s recipient of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, awarded for three decades of work ranging from a bandstand at Bexhill to the Stirling Prize-winning library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. His new book is not the monograph that usually follows. Uncle Toby’s Garden takes its title from the novel Tristram Shandy — Toby is the wounded veteran who spends his days reenacting a war on his bowling green in a pastime that is both trivial and profound — and it is organised around digressions rather than buildings. The book catalogues the practice’s open-ended processes, reframing architecture as the performances of ritual, collaboration, speculation and play.

On July 21st Níall joined Matthew Blunderfield at POST PRESS to discuss the book’s gestation. Here we present an extract of that conversation. The full interview forms the latest episode of the Architecture Foundation podcast Scaffold.

Why did Tristram Shandy become the organising principle?

I’ve loved it since I was a teenager, and as an Irish person I feel the connection between Sterne and later Irish writers is sometimes not fully understood. He was a huge influence on Joyce and Beckett — partly because of his acceptance of the absurdity of the human condition. We’re all trying for completion, all trying to create forms of order, and those forms of order can never fully be sustained. So we spend our lives, as Sterne would put it, riding our hobby horses, pursuing with more and more diligence the things we’re interested in, as ways to control the protean nature of the world and restate it in our own terms.

The wonderful absurdity of the book is that it sets out to be a biography of Tristram Shandy and ends up four days before he was born, because his desire to describe the world as comprehensively as it needs to be described takes longer than the living of the life itself. He’s always losing ground against the complexity of life. And that sense of absurdity is a form of real wisdom. Once you’re into it you realise you’re not going anywhere with this book, and therefore the only thing you need to be doing is enjoying reading it. It becomes all about getting there rather than arriving.

That helped me think about architecture, which has frequently been formulated in terms of the production of exquisite, singly-authored artefacts. It’s often seen as instrumental — that it’s for something, or at its most extreme that it can change people or change societies by being what it is. While I accept there are aspects of architecture that are like that, I want in some way to resist that formulation.

Matthew Blunderfield (Ellis Woodman)

You write that design and material practice contain “rituals, veilings and erotics.” Architects don’t tend to write this way. Can you unpack what you’re saying here?

We allow ourselves to believe we’re involved in a transparent, purposeful activity when we’re architects. But from the beginning of our education we’re brought into a way of thinking that’s highly ritualistic, guarded by its own shibboleths, and becomes to some extent the activity of an in-group who communicate through nuances — turns of line, turns of phrase, details — in which people display their virtuosity through these micro-communications within the drawing. We don’t realise we’ve been inculcated into a whole series of rituals we take for granted and think are common sense. All you’ve got to do is attempt to test them against the public, and you’re lost.

Did you say and you’re lust?

I’m glad you think I said “and you’re lust,” because you’re obviously chasing that word erotics.

I am chasing it.

I didn’t say it — but I’m very welcome to talk about my lust, if you like.

Please.

Why would these things not be described in terms of erotics? Architecture is not in that sense a chaste discipline. It has its own forms of desire within it, and those are part of how architects communicate with each other, the pleasure they take in each other’s buildings. I wouldn’t hide from it. We persuade ourselves that we’re reasonable people going about a reasonable activity on behalf of the public — which to some extent is true — but there’s a whole other thing going on that we don’t talk about very much.

The book opens with a 2012 project in Stratford. It’s built, but it isn’t quite a building — it’s a skin.

The decision was made that the Olympic Athletes’ Village should be designed in principle by the best young practitioners in the UK, to embody the cultural aspiration of architecture. On the other hand it was being developed by Lend Lease, a pretty tough major development company. I describe it as a three-legged race — that school sports game where kids have two legs tied together. It’s perfectly clear the two parties aren’t looking for the same thing, but they’ve got to hobble along together.

Lend Lease looked at these twenty-five young architects and said, we’re not going to employ all these people, it’ll be chaos. So they picked four reliable players and said: you design what they called the chassis, like the chassis of a car. Then these young architects can dress the chassis in a façade of whatever design they like — and by the way, they’ll be sub-consultants to you.

What interested me is that at the beginning of the twentieth century architects were obsessed with Taylorisation — the breaking down of making into component parts. Corbusier writes about the Delage motor car as the highest product of modern society, overseen by the architect, “the austere overseer” in his words. But if you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. You can Taylorise architecture too — because then a client like Lend Lease says: why would we have these architects with their strange cults and erotics and myriad interests, which are of no interest to us, overseeing the project, when we could just have a project manager?

So the chassis is by one architect, the masterplan by another, the interiors by another, the façade by an architect, the landscape by an architect. And we thought: let’s accept that notion, and see what we can make of it. Corbusier also believed the Parthenon was an ancient version of the same process, with Phidias the sculptor as his overseer — he makes this comparison between the Parthenon and the Delage. That’s where the project started.

So you go into the British Museum and scan the marbles. How do you persuade a client so concerned with efficiency to let you embark on what, from the outside, looks like a dalliance?

I’ll just remind you that dalliance is a virtue in Uncle Toby’s garden.

We’re in the office and we say, what’s the first thing we do? Let’s ring up the British Museum. So we did, and were put on to the keeper of the stones. We told him what we wanted, and there was a long pause, and he said: I guess you’ve realised we don’t have copyright on the stones. I’d never even thought about it, but I went, yes, of course, we’ve worked that out.

Ian Jenkins just said, come on in. It was one of the best nights of my life. At two in the morning I got on my bike and went down to the British Museum, where we had this fantastic group of guys from the Slade scanning the stones, in with the security guards and the cleaners. And in the middle of it Jenkins arrives, at three in the morning, in a beautiful tweed suit, and gives me the most beautiful description of the marbles in terms of music and orchestration. The carving is five deep on one side and six deep on the other, and he said you have to imagine the illusion is that the cavalry are riding through the building. It was almost like cinema.

And all through the night he was saying: Níall, you’ve got these very esoteric ideas about the meaning of this stone or that stone. The people of London don’t want that. What they want is the horses. The horses, Níall. The horses, the horses.

So he completely hobby-horsed me that night. At the end I said to the guys scanning: cut the scan, we’re changing the whole project, we’re doing the horses.

And then you had to build them.

Someone at Lend Lease had decided that as a site-wide policy they’d bring rainwater pipes down the outside of the buildings. So our lovely horses were going to have pipes running straight down in front of them. And the project managers go: site-wide policy, site-wide policy.

I heard this guy was travelling first class from Newcastle to Manchester on a certain day. So I went up to Newcastle, got onto the same train, walked past first class and went — oh, fancy seeing you here. Sat down beside him. Said, just about the rainwater pipes. By the end of the journey he’d accepted we didn’t have rainwater pipes going down our building. I said, what a coincidence to see you here, and got the train back from Manchester.

The whole thing was like a play we were all acting in. At one crit, all these cultural commentators had decided that the thing which would hold the Village together was that every building must have a base, a middle and a top. I was showing my neutral grid with the cavalry suspended in it, saying it’s really important the lattice is primary and not hierarchical. And they’re going: we understand that, Níall, but could you modulate it a bit at the bottom and a bit at the top, just as a nuance? And I’m going, it’s not a question of nuance, it’s a question of do you have it or do you not.

And suddenly the guy from Lend Lease goes: “You. Base, middle, top. Monday. Or you’re fired.”

Níall McLaughlin (Ellis Woodman)

So that was the three-legged race in action. I took a deep breath and thought: we’ve got a value engineering meeting on Wednesday, so I guess we’ll have a base, middle and top for two days. We designed a very elaborate one, handed it to the quantity surveyors on Wednesday, and it was gone again by Thursday.

Part of the project was that it was a performance — standing up in front of the client going: these are the rules you set, look at us playing by them. This is a game and we’re playing it too.

The book includes a collective drawing project made in Orkney. What draws you to the neolithic?

There’s a beautiful text by the archaeologist Colin Richards, who asks why a community in the early Neolithic would spend a third of all their social and material resources dragging stones to make a circle in this marginalised place. He noticed they kept moving the stones around the circle, and he said: what you’re looking at as a fixed monument is actually more like a still from a dance. And eventually he speculates that construction had started to replace blood as a way of holding communities together.

So the purpose of the community is not to make the building; the purpose of the building is to make the community — and not just the building as a made thing, but the ritual of making it. Which means the task is not to invent new things but to take something somebody has handed you, care for it, reimagine it, and pass it on. Architecture becomes a sustained performance over time.

In the sheer breadth of work and experimentation on display, the book makes a convincing argument against the culture of specialism that abounds in architecture today.

The best chapel I ever built was my first chapel. The best library I ever built was my first library. The best dementia centre I did was my first one. We’re constantly receiving pre-application questionnaires asking how many of these things you’ve done before, and in my experience your ability might be in inverse proportion to the number you’ve done — because there’s something about doing it for the first time that you bring an intensity of imagining to. Again and again, your best shot is your first shot.

The specialism in architecture is making buildings. If you need a specialist, find one. Talk to people. Learn about it. You can spend years learning about people with dementia, or how to design a chapel for an Anglican college. I’m designing a burial ground for the Ismaili community at the moment, learning about funerals and about Shia Islam. The most beautiful thing about being an architect is that it’s a way of learning about the world.

And what you realise — to bring us back to Tristram Shandy — is that comprehensive knowledge is impossible. That’s what the book mocks. Not the idea that we should have experts, but the sense that we can know something in its entirety.

What we do is attempt to make worlds, all the time. This is the ritual of making worlds, the performance of making worlds. This is what architecture is. And for the generation in the room around me, there are going to be technologies that take away so many things we think are central to our discipline. But technology can only make better and better objects, and architecture is fundamentally not about making objects — it’s about rituals that bind communities together through processes they enact together. We need a bigger paradigm: architecture as a repertoire of performances. We’re on a hiding to nothing if that’s the way we perceive it.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. Hope not too many digressions.

Roger Madelin, on sofa left. (Matthew Blunderfield).

Hugh Scott Moncrieff (CAKE)

The discussion today isn’t simply about unlocking vacant buildings. It’s about something broader: how cities can create the conditions for cultural production to happen in the first place. London contains an extraordinary amount of creative talent. It also contains a significant amount of temporarily vacant space. Yet access to affordable space for making, performing and experimenting continues to diminish. That suggests the challenge isn’t simply spatial; it’s also institutional, financial and political. Rather than arriving at a single answer, we hope to bring together different perspectives, and leave with a richer understanding of what it would take to build a more culturally productive city. With that, I’d like to introduce our panel. Roger Madelin was the long-time head of Argent who led the King’s Cross development, and more recently a director at British Land—one of the UK’s leading figures in urban regeneration, bringing the perspective of large-scale development and long-term placemaking. Roland Fischer-Vousden is a writer and co-founder and director of SET, transforming vacant buildings into affordable studios, art spaces and community hubs across London. Susanna Davies-Crook is a writer, curator and cultural strategist whose work spans cultural institutions, public programming and civic culture. Will Jennings is director of Hypha Studios, a charity working with developers, landlords and local authorities to transform vacant commercial buildings into free cultural spaces for artists and creative practitioners. Ali Wagner is a nightlife researcher and cultural producer whose work explores accessibility, inclusion and grassroots cultural production. Roger, let me turn to you first. Why is it often easier for buildings to remain vacant than to be temporarily occupied by cultural activity?

Roger Madelin (British Land)

I’ve closed down lots of nightclubs in my career—places like Barbarella’s—but Broad Street in Birmingham is now very famous for its nightlife. At King’s Cross, we closed things down, but I think people might say King’s Cross is now quite a good place for culture. Maybe there isn’t enough affordable space in the development and its hinterland, but we did a lot with the empty historic buildings that were available. They were semi-derelict, but before we got planning we tried to encourage activity. We had photographers, poets and an artist in residence, and we tried to accommodate anyone who came up with a good idea and had some funding. We were also approached by a lot of people who didn’t have any funding. Art and culture were part of King’s Cross before we got planning and started the development. People might say there wasn’t enough grassroots activity, which I would accept.

Canada Water became famous for Printworks, a wonderful, massive, empty industrial building that was costing £800,000 a year when I arrived. I thought it would be good to find £800,000 so that it stopped costing that money. When we met the company now called Broadwick Live, we didn’t know it was going to turn the building into one of the world’s best electronic music venues, as well as a great place for classical music, ballet, dance and other uses. We’ve spent the last six years coming up with a business plan that works. We have planning permission to bring it into the twenty-first century and add culture seven days a week. We launched it three years ago as a new building, but the funders—British Land and AustralianSuper—decided it was too risky at the time. We’ve been trying to come up with a new financial plan, which we have, but AustralianSuper don’t want to be part of it. It has been very tough because they got into development just before Russia invaded Ukraine. People tell me development has never been as hard in 40 years. Stuart Lipton told me it has never been as hard in 55 years.

The reason empty buildings stay empty is because it’s very hard to bring them back to life unless they’ve got the power and the water, or you find someone like Broadwick who are able to bring in the scale to make 6,000 people here safely occupy it. It’s just very hard. You need someone who wants to do it. Why have I always wanted to do it? Because I think it will add value, it gets people there. You want to do it because it reduces the cost of the empty building sometimes. You do it because you’re pretty confident that the place you’re trying to create will have a substantial amount of culture in it. All great cities have cultural uses embedded within them, and you can’t really create a good mixed-use new piece of city without massive amounts of diverse culture in.

I’ve stepped back a bit: I’m now a strategic adviser. I’m hanging on to Canada Water, but I’m also advising on Cambridge Airport, where there are 14 major hangars. We’re thinking seriously about art, culture and performance there, and it’s getting very exciting.

Hugh Scott Moncrieff

The point that development has never been so hard is interesting, and perhaps we’re all feeling that in one way or another. The conditions have to be right: you need actors such as Broadwick Live, or enabling institutions. That’s part of what we’re asking—who are they, and what do they need to do? At a time when it has never been so hard to develop, there is a lot of empty space because the money isn’t there for the more permanent work. On paper, that might look like a ripe environment for meanwhile occupation. Where do the barriers really sit? Is it about money?

Roland Fischer-Vousden (SET)

It’s almost always cost. When we’re offered a building, we have to look at the business rates, utilities and installation costs. Over the last ten years, we’ve delivered perhaps half a million square feet of meanwhile space. We won’t pay rent on a meanwhile building if the term is under five years. Recently we were offered around 100,000 square feet in the City of London. Even at 20% business rates, the cost would have been higher than anyone could afford in studio rent. Rates are simply too high, and utilities are increasing. Part of the reason it’s harder to use a building in the UK than in Brussels is that commercial rent is generally much higher. London may be the most expensive city in the world for commercial rent. Business rates tax the use of a building rather than the building itself, so the cost is pushed onto the occupier. That creates an economy which favours not using buildings. And electricity is also I think the highest in Europe. So that makes for an economy that essentially favours not using buildings.

Will Jennings (Hypha)

Up and down the country, there are high streets with 5, 6, 7, 10 shops all vinylled up and the knock-on effect of the landlord saving money is people not coming to the high street, not going to the cafe, not visiting another shop or another kind of third space or activity centre. So there needs to be more joined-up thinking about taking the agency away from an individual landlord or property group. We need a more collective idea of the high street, the community and the range of offers a place needs. One of Hypha’s greatest spaces is in Hillsborough, Sheffield. It’s a beautiful part of the city, but it isn’t as wealthy as some others and has social and demographic difficulties. We have a former Wilko store which we gave to artists for free. On the ground floor there’s a children’s community art space, which around 6,000 children have visited in a year. On the first floor there’s a changing exhibition in a huge exhibition space, and on the top floor there are 16 or 17 free artists’ studios. It has been there for about two years and will probably be there for another two. Because of it, the coffee shop next door is doing really well; people come into the town centre, it’s in the local press, the MP visits, and suddenly there’s an energy.

Ali Wagner

I want to pick up on what Roger and Hugh were saying. We talk about needing more Broadwick Lives and spaces for 6,000 people at Printworks, but as someone working in nightlife as a smaller, grassroots-focused promoter, I would never consider taking on one of those spaces. In my opinion, perhaps we don’t need more Broadwick Lives, because that can represent a very commercialised model of art and music. We should also look at giving space to people like me, smaller collectives and groups of artists who may not come from families with money or backgrounds that give them resources and knowledge. Responsibility sits with developers, but also with organisations such as Broadwick Live, SET and others that have this knowledge. They need to share information and help us make those changes too.

Will Jennings

To respond to that, I’ll give a nutshell account of what Hypha has done. Camilla, my colleague and our CEO, was in exactly your situation five years ago: a graduate curator who wanted to put on shows, but not in expensive white-wall galleries with all their infrastructure and networks. She wanted to use empty shops. She knocked on doors and wasn’t answered, partly because she was unknown and female. Landlords and developers also didn’t necessarily know what a curator or artist did; often they thought it sounded messy or chaotic. By setting up a charity five years ago, we have created those conditions in 70 or 80 locations across the UK, delivering around 220 exhibitions and giving free space to more than 3,000 artists for exhibitions and studios. That ranges from Edinburgh to Hastings and includes theatre groups. People apply through a free open call. We look for a good public programme, an account of how it will engage the local community, and a connection to the area.

Hugh Scott Moncrieff (Matthew Blunderfield)

Hugh Scott Moncrieff

in our first four years as a studio, we’ve worked on temporary projects that were realised and on several more permanent club-space projects that did not come to fruition. In the case of the Pickle Factory in Hackney, there wasn’t really the investment, shared resource or enabling support from a grassroots point of view, and in the end it fell over. Part of our research has been into what I might call enabling organisations. Hypha may sit partly within this category. In Brussels, organisations such as Toestand, Communa and Bodies in Space act as intermediaries, brokering contracts and deals between grassroots operators and event organisers on one side, and developers, councils or private landowners on the other - essentially finding value-add on both sides of the coin. A big part of that value-add is, I believe, what Will has been talking about up in Sheffield - the regeneration of community from a grassroots level. So the new nursery actually informs a new cafe, that informs an art gallery.

Susanna Davies-Crook

I come at this as a writer and a curator, an arts journalist, and to some extent a cultural historian. I went to university in Leeds and wrote my thesis on self-organisation, cooperativism and DIY culture there, because it was absolutely an example of that. Leeds didn’t really have many institutions. It had Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute, and then a group of students from Leeds set up the Tetley, which became an institution and had many issues of its own. There were many relationships—this was almost 20 years ago, in 2008 or 2009—with developers, exploring what it might look like to create institutions in meanwhile spaces or in relation to development. If we look at London now, and the development of management infrastructure in the interim, it is all geared towards a reduction in risk. This reduction in risk is why we have this growth of places lthat are only able to trust organisations on the scale of Broadway.

Roger Madelin

They were small at the time. They were just two guys, not a big institution. They didn’t come in and say, we’re going to pay you rent. They just said: ‘We’ll try this and try that.’ But sometimes, from a developer’s point of view, meeting someone that’s kind of done it is helpful because they know about dealing with the local authorities and they know about the health and safety issues, which are massive.

Susanna Davies-Crook

My point is really about the ecosystem: ensuring that artists and DIY culture are part of it, and that institutions and developers create a shared platform for risk rather than concentrating it in one place. As a curator, I can speak to institutional practice. Funding cuts, neoliberalism and reduced Arts Council support have diminished venue models. We end up with a kind of ‘venue-isation’ of culture, in which curators, artists, DJs, nightlife workers, cooperatives and communities don’t get the chance simply to play, experiment or explore. We need that space for play, risk and experimentation. Institutions should support it. I think we should have more large institutions supporting artists, more artists and more local activity. Everyone has to be welcome.

Roger Madelin

From a developer’s point of view or building owner’s point of view, it’d be much nicer if you just had one organisation saying “We can guide you through the planning. We can guide you through the temporary uses. We can guide you through all the health and safety stuff.” The developer is thinking “I haven’t got the resources to explore how to make all this happen because it’s not going to make any money”.

Will Jennings

But it can make money through a different accounting mechanism. For the last year we’ve had free galleries in No. 1 Poultry. They wanted the space activated, for want of a better phrase. They wanted something at ground level because the units have been shut up since COVID. They trusted us, they’d seen us work with British Land especially at Euston Tower. I was talking to the people behind the developers and they said: “In the future we can put in some shops down here or a cafe, sure, but it’s not going to make us a huge amount of money. This is not where the money of this building is going to be. That’s in office rental above. But if we put in art galleries and something interesting on the ground level, it brings people there and the offices above are going to go for more because it’s a cool place to be.” It can still make money, but it’s money that is accounted in different ways.

On sofa from left: Roland Fischer Vousden, Susanna Davies-Crook, Will Jennings (Matthew Blunderfield)

Roland Fischer-Vousden

Presumably it isn’t enough, because we don’t have many permanent buildings for arts occupation. Meanwhile use can save money, which is why it happens, but it doesn’t make enough for developers to want to retain it in the long term. Most of the time, when I talk to developers and say we can do a meanwhile occupation and then deliver a permanent building with genuinely affordable studios—perhaps even passing it into the hands of local people who want to run it—the response is: ‘Can you pay £30 a square foot?’ Obviously, we can’t. That sits at the core of the problem. Developments don’t end up with multipurpose uses that reflect what communities or government want, because the question is framed as ‘How do we extract as much money as possible from the land?’ rather than ‘What do we need to build to make a functioning society?’ That has to be state-led. The planning process is supposed to mediate between the developer’s aim of making money and the needs identified by communities and government, but it doesn’t work. Section 106 commitments get pushed down and down until there is no permanent space left. I think the problem isn’t so much; how do we do meanwhile? We do loads of meanwhile. We do need to pass on that information better to people coming in, and I think we could set up a school to do that. We’re going to release a pamphlet of 10 Steps to Ruining Your Life or something like that in September. But what we really need to think about is how do you move from a system that favours trying to maximise profit on land towards a system that thinks, what do we need in the country and how do we make sure that’s delivered?

Ali Wagner

I live in like one of the last few warehouses in Hackney Wick, and I look out my window and it’s literally all new builds that look identical. On the ground floors are all these vacant commercial spaces, and no one wants to rent them yet because it’s not, I guess, all developed yet. There is no green space and there’s no culture. The warehouse people are the last bit of culture left there and once we all get booted out in a year or two, I think living there is going to be totally depressing because there’s literally nothing to do.

Susanna Davies-Crook

It’s also interesting within the history of East London. Shoreditch was where the YBAs were, then it became gentrified and activity moved outwards. Gentrification has kept moving around East London, following artists until there is almost no East London left. Twenty years ago, conversations were already about how artists are used and instrumentalised in the production of capital. Institutions have a role in holding people to account—for protecting culture, supporting artists and creating an ecosystem.

Ali Wagner

Gentrification is inevitable but how can we make it better?

Roger Madelin

Well, it’s economic investment and economic activity, and it should be a good thing. In the case of Fish Island, presumably— I’m not trying to defend the developers, you know, I haven’t been down there recently— but it’s probably one-off development. Each plot has a developer, who is thinking: I need to build it, I need to make the money, I need to pay the bank back and get on to the next one. If you’re lucky enough to be looking at something like King’s Cross or Canada Water, you are curating the whole place, and affordable space should be part of that although not to the extent that it may been before development started. King’s Cross was full of quite interesting, sometimes nefarious activities in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and you wouldn’t want those to stay because they were antisocial. If you took people to Shoreditch 30 years ago, you really would have been worried for your health and well-being. There was a point when everyone said: “Oh, it’s now fantastic because it’s really cool, it’s full of artists.” And then suddenly there’s a point where they go: “Oh no, it’s been gentrified here, it’s terrible.” But it goes to the next bit of London, it moves up somewhere into Hackney, or it moves out to Stratford, or it moves out to Barking, or it moves out to Dagenham. As a free market liberal, I would say, there isn’t anything wrong with that. And developers or local authorities who are responsible for larger areas, should obviously think about the mix and the ecosystem, but allowing places to change and support more economic activity is a good thing for those communities.

Roland Fischer-Vousden

But its also displaces many communities.

Roger Madelin

People shouldn’t be kicked out of affordable housing; it is owned by the state. Look at King’s Cross and Somers Town. Around 95% of Somers Town, between Euston and King’s Cross, was affordable housing. It had very little economic activity. Many children in the schools had never known anyone with a job beyond the police or teaching. Adding economic activity and gentrifying the area—was that good? Nobody was moved out of those houses. More houses were built, bringing in other economic activity, and some were sold for millions of pounds. But social tenants weren’t kicked out and their rents didn’t go up. Other people came in and provided economic activity. That’s not a bad thing. Of course we should be building more council housing.

Roland Fischer-Vousden

But as you were saying, the activity gets displaced. So let’s say you have a community organisation who really likes using their local social centre and during the redevelopment that gets moved to Barking or Dagenham. The problem is that you can’t interrupt people’s lives and then say the activity has simply moved somewhere else and that this is good for those other people. It isn’t good for the people who were displaced. You may argue that the benefits outweigh the harm because a place becomes safer, but we have to be realistic that displacement occurs. We experience it all the time through meanwhile-use projects. When SET Woolwich had to close, around 600 artists were using the building. We’re releasing a report in September. We measured people’s mental health: it was above average while they had the studios, but when they were told the building would close, more than half fell below the clinical threshold for depression.

Roger Madelin

There’s 100 acres in Charlton that’s completely derelict. Why don’t they move there? Because it’s cheap and it’s controlled by the local authority. Your local authority should be regenerating Charlton.

Roland Fischer-Vousden

I completely agree. We tried to work with Greenwich Council to deliver some of those warehouses.

Roger Madelin

They’re amazing, aren’t they? Especially if you have a strategy to bring artists in—

Roland Fischer-Vousden

I don’t know why they don’t.

Will Jennings

I think there’s something to say there about strategy. The discussion around council housing is really important because we’re not simply failing to build enough now; we’re barely building any. That’s a huge failure of the state at national level. In this neoliberal process of drawing back the big state and devolving responsibility to smaller and smaller agents—even below local authorities, into BIDs and individual developments—we lose the larger view. Roger, you used the phrase ‘we’ve curated culture around King’s Cross’. I don’t think culture needs to be curated in that way; ‘curated’ is overused anyway. There was culture in King’s Cross, just as there was a great deal of culture across the Olympics site before the Olympics: glass manufacturers, furniture-repair businesses and so on. Now there is a very well-curated culture—the V&A, Storehouse, my university UCL and others. King’s Cross had culture too. Some of it was nefarious, but there was a huge queer cultural scene, with legal and illegal nightclubs. There is great culture there now: the Queer Britain museum, music venues and other things. But it is a different kind of culture when it is curated from the top. Culture, for me, emerges from the bottom; it isn’t placed. When it is placed, it can jar with communities. It can present itself for the day-tripper or tourist rather than the people who live there or make culture there.

Roger Madelin

But why don’t you go next door? Go to Charlton. I was completely blown away. Every time you think all of London has been gentrified, you turn a corner and think: my God, how many acres, how many buildings.

Will Jennings

There is no next door anymore.

Roger Madelin

There’s always next door. There’s always a next door.

View of Clay 1A across Ipswich marina. (THING)

Clay 1A is a new museum devoted to the role of the ceramic object in domestic life, which will be based in a remodelled late Victorian building on Ipswich Marina. As part of POST PRESS’s week of events devoted to clay, Ellis Woodman discussed the project with its founder Crispin Kelly and his architects THING.

Ellis Woodman: Crispin, the project is rooted in your passion for ceramics. You’re a maker yourself. How did that begin?

Crispin Kelly: About eight years ago, after my mother died, I inherited her kiln, wheel and tools. I started fiddling about in a shed at home and immediately connected with clay. It is alive when you work with it, but becomes everlasting once it is fired. Many people here will have had lessons in a clay studio, and once you’re in, you’re in. It is absorbing, therapeutic and a wonderful thing to do. I had always collected, and collecting is an important part of this building. Ceramic objects are also relatively inexpensive compared with fine art, so I rapidly acquired a very large collection. I realised that it was something to share. The question was how to show ceramic objects that sit somewhere between craft and art without reproducing the experience of the top floor of the V&A. I wanted something closer to an anti-museum. You would be able to touch everything and pick things up. Breakage would be accepted as part of the life of the museum. Where possible, sound would be part of the way you interacted with objects. That seemed worth exploring.At the same time, I was thinking about my work as a housing developer and the question of what makes people flourish at home. I came to the slightly provocative conclusion that the architect may be the least important part of that, because most people never have the opportunity to commission one. What people can do is choose what they put in their home. That led me to think more critically about objects made of clay as cultural possessions: ordinary things that help define us and establish us at home. The starting point became a place that would show ceramics differently, allied to the idea that everyday objects are containers of value. A thing can be far more important than it first appears.

Crispin Kelly at POST PRESS with a vomit cup that forms part of the Clay 1A collection. (Matthew Blunderfield)

Ellis Woodman: The project is the work of a new practice THING, co-founded by Tom Randall-Page, Lucas Facer and Patrick Fryer. Crispin, this commission, which you initially extended to Tom, provided the context for the formation of the practice. I believe you first encountered Tom’s work when you were on the jury for New Architects 4. What did you respond to?

Crispin Kelly: I saw the project Tom had done for his father. I had not come across that kind of work before: someone inventing mechanisms, half making things himself, putting a box inside a box. It seemed brilliant and fun.

Tom Randall Page: My father is a sculptor, and the project was a home for his work: an archive and a gallery where he could bring clients. It was an agricultural building and still needed to read as a modern agricultural building. The brief was basically to make a magic box — something that could transform and surprise people by revealing another world inside. I made a lot of moving parts, partly because that was appropriate and partly because I simply enjoy doing it.

Crispin Kelly: That project began our discussion.

Tom Randall Page: You invited me to your new flat and talked about this idea for probably two hours. It was only in the last ten minutes that I realised, “Oh my God — you think I could do this?” I had been completely happy just talking about an exciting idea. Perhaps I was relaxed because I did not feel I was trying to win a job.

Ellis Woodman: So at that point, Tom, you had a practice, but not really an office.

Tom Randall Page at POST PRESS with Lucas Facer on the left. (Matthew Blunderfield)

Tom Randall Page: I had been practising for about ten years, essentially as myself with loose collaborations. I had worked with Lucas for around five years, and on projects with Patrick and others. But this was a galvanising moment. Opportunities like this do not come along often. It felt once-in-a-lifetime.

Crispin Kelly: I told them they needed an office and another member of staff. They could not run this from three separate email addresses with Tom permanently on the move and everything floating around in the cloud. That was not going to work for me. I should also say that I have always enjoyed working with architects who do not know what they are doing. I find it more rewarding than working with somebody who already knows exactly what they are doing. There are risks and things may take longer, but a lack of experience can be enormously enriching.

Ellis Woodman: It should be said, Crispin, that you studied at the Architectural Association, which is highly unusual for a developer. Your projects often feel jointly authored: you are not a conventional arm’s-length client.

Crispin Kelly: There are things I know I dislike, and I will say so. But I want the architects to design. I do not want to design the project myself. I might make suggestions, and I will certainly object to certain kinds of balustrade, but if I am happy with the broad frame, I do not want to be doing the details.

Ellis Woodman: And for THING, how did three designers find a shared set of preoccupations and a common sense of authorship?

Patrick Fryer: We came with slightly different specialisms. I am probably a bit more geeky and technical. Tom is more of a dreamer, and Lucas can do both at once. It settled into a flow quite naturally. We do not divide the practice neatly into design and delivery. We mix the tasks as we go. Being three people makes decision-making easy: if two people vote against you, you are overruled, and there is no large team to brief. We can move through ideas quickly.

Lucas Facer: There is a lot of intuition, and it feels comfortable. Patrick and I had known each other for years but had not actually worked together when we decided to form the practice. Starting a business together was a leap but Tom trusted the combination, and it has been phenomenal to discover how intuitively the three of us understand one another.

Tom Randall Page: I had long, close relationships with both of them. People say not to mix business and pleasure, but trust goes a hell of a long way.

Ellis Woodman: Crispin, what possibilities did you consider before arriving at the present site?

The building in which Clay 1A is being created as it stands.

Crispin Kelly: When the idea was still abstract — a visitor attraction, somewhere interesting and fun — I did consider London. But it would have been very expensive and would have had to compete with a huge amount of other stuff. It did not feel exciting enough, or distinctive enough. Ipswich is about half an hour from where I live and is well connected to London. It is also a depleted town. The port moved to Felixstowe, containerisation changed its economy and the town centre suffered in a very English way. But it has a quiet and interesting cultural life, and there seemed to be an appetite that could grow. I looked at several buildings. Looking back, some of the ones I nearly chose would have been terrible. I almost bought a building behind the marina’s main street, which would have been too detached from the town centre. The current building was the fourth I considered, and it immediately felt like the right home. It is a brick warehouse built around 1900. Amazingly, it was called the Home Warehouse. Grain arriving from East Anglia was stored there before travelling around the world, and a railway line ran beneath it. It performed that function for roughly sixty years. Later, it was converted into offices.

Tom Randall Page: The building is, broadly, a big brick box to the north and a steel frame to the south, projecting over what used to be the railway tracks. The steel-framed part was originally corrugated iron and was reclad in shiny glass in the 1980s. It has already had two lives. First it was a grain warehouse: receiving grain from boats, storing it and distributing it onto trains, or the reverse. Then it became a commercial office building for a shipping company and later a law firm. That second life brought air-conditioning, lowered ceilings, carpet tiles, plaster mouldings, polystyrene and a fair number of postmodern flourishes.Now it is entering a third phase. Over the last few months we have been selectively stripping it back. This is not a restoration project. We are not trying to return it to a supposed original state or pretend there was a golden age. The building is complex and has had many lives. We are leaving some things, cutting new holes, being precious about certain elements and unprecious about others. There is a strong environmental agenda in that approach. We do not want to waste things that still perform perfectly well. Materials removed in one place are being reused elsewhere: original floorboards lifted and relaid, bricks reused inside the building, steelwork taken out, stored and put back.

Rendering of the central atrium (THING)

Patrick Fryer: We are actually slightly reducing the total area by taking out some floors and creating taller, double-height spaces. The glazed southern wing is south-west facing and currently becomes incredibly hot, so it will be reclad and upgraded.

Lucas Facer: The old grain warehouse also had a chimney running to the roof. We are using that as part of a stack-ventilation strategy for the whole building. The environmental logic is becoming part of the architecture rather than something concealed behind it.

Model of Clay 1A installed at POST PRESS as part of THING’s exhibition Touching Earth.

Ellis Woodman: You are developing a building design at the same time as a curatorial strategy. How is one informing the other?

Crispin Kelly: The curatorial framework is still coming. For me, the essential test is that it should not feel like other places. If you love the top floor of the V&A, you may not like it here. But since hardly anybody goes there, that may not be a major problem.

Lucas Facer: The space I am most excited about, and perhaps the biggest unknown, is Loose Clay at the top of the brick building. The premise is simple: build a community around clay and play, and let people participate without needing to see themselves as a conventional cultural audience. We know the image is compelling because it is often the part people remember. How it works in practice is still an open question.

Tom Randall Page: The continuing fluidity is one of the project’s strengths. A public institution financed through many grant applications might already have had to define every piece of content. Here we are making infrastructure while the content can still evolve, which is more realistic because content always changes. There was a useful point when we stopped worrying about pinning down every programme and said: let us make great infrastructure — a diverse set of really good spaces that can be repurposed. Good content will find them.

Clay 1A will open in 2028. This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place at POST PRESS on 30th July 2026.

New Architects 5 is available for purchase at the Architecture Foundation website. POST PRESS operates at the Zaha Hadid Foundation until 8 August.

The 77 choices are presented in order of publication date.

The Craftsman’s Handbook: “Il Libro dell’ Arte”. Cennino d’Andrea Cennini and Daniel V Thompson Jr, early 15th century.

Chosen by Ivo Carew Architects

While this 15th-century Florentine handbook on Renaissance painting techniques provides little in the way of useful technical instruction to our 21st-century London architectural practice, what it does provide is a foundation to design thinking and making. It considers craftsmanship on a granular level. We particularly enjoy the exacting lengths Cennini goes to when describing what kind of bone to use as a paint material: “Take bone from the second joints and wings of fowls, or of a capon; and the older they are the better. Just as you find them under the dining-table, put them into the fire; and when you see that they have turned whiter than ashes, draw them out, and grind them well on the porphyry; and use it as I say above.”

The Modern Home: A Book of Domestic Architecture for Moderate Incomes. Walter Shaw Sparrow, 1906.

Chosen by AOMD

This book is not just a celebration of architects such as Lutyens and Voysey, but curious and consistently brilliant domestic architecture of this late 19th- and early 20th-century period.

Home and Environment. Walter Segal, 1948.

Chosen by DMcC Studio

Walter Segal’s Home and Environment remains highly relevant to our practice because it presents architecture not as a finished object, but as a framework that empowers people to shape their own environments. Written in the aftermath of war and housing shortage, Segal’s ideas challenge conventional models of construction, advocating for accessible, adaptable and resource-conscious forms of building that place human needs at the centre of the design process. At DMC, we are interested in architecture as a social and civic act. Segal’s emphasis on self-build, participation and incremental growth continues to inform our thinking around housing, community infrastructure and the reuse of existing buildings. His work demonstrates how architecture can be generous, open-ended and capable of accommodating change over time rather than prescribing fixed patterns of occupation. The book is particularly important today as we confront housing inequality, environmental pressures and questions around access to land and resources. Segal’s belief that people should have a greater role in shaping their own homes resonates strongly with our ongoing research into cooperative housing, social infrastructure and alternative models of development. More than seventy years after its publication, Home and Environment remains a powerful reminder that architecture can be both practical and transformative, creating not only buildings, but the conditions for collective agency, ownership and belonging.

The Natural House. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1954.

Chosen by Izat Arundell

In all honesty, we don’t tend to read many architecture books, but Frank Lloyd Wright: The Natural House has always resonated with us for its ideas about dwellings, landscapes and material honesty. Wright’s belief that a house should grow out of its site rather than sit on it is of particular interest, as is his view of architecture as a lived experience. The book is rather witty at times too, including an anecdote about Wright keeping spare keys to clients’ homes so he could visit – often when they were away on holiday – to rearrange the furniture…because who can trust a client! While these ‘site visits’ might be legally questionable, they reflect the idea that a home is never truly finished. Overall, it’s the sense of homes being deeply connected to both place and people which is what makes us return to this book time and time again.

Architecture Without Architects. Bernard Rudofsky, 1964.

Chosen by Arbor Architects

Architecture Without Architects has long been an important reference for our practice. Rudofsky’s study of vernacular architecture reveals how buildings can emerge directly from climatic conditions, available materials, and local craft traditions, rather than from imposed formal or stylistic agendas. The projects documented in the book demonstrate a remarkable sensitivity to landscape, culture, and environment, offering examples of architecture that is both resourceful and deeply rooted in place. For us, the book remains a powerful reminder that thoughtful design does not rely on novelty or spectacle, but on an attentive response to context. It continues to inform our approach to creating buildings that are grounded, materially honest, and in dialogue with their surroundings.

La Casa Colonica in Toscana (The Farmhouse in Tuscany). Guido Biffoli, 1966.

Chosen by Jonathan Walker

This is an extraordinary and beautiful collection of photographs of enigmatic rural houses and landscapes taken by Guido Biffoli, with meticulous road maps by Guido Ferrara. The book encourages you to make thoughtful itineraries that pay attention to lesser known sites and buildings and to respect those that build. From my childhood, the farmhouse, has been insolubly linked with my ideas of beauty, functionality and harmony. The buildings in this volume stand as impeccable examples of functional spaces attached to the landscape according to a precise idea and clear need. They contain something else that I am particularly interested in; architecture whose underlying purity is adjusted, supplemented or challenged by secondary orders and elements.

Shelter. Lloyd Kahn and Bob Easton, 1973.

Chosen by Nebbia and Thing Studio

Both Nebbia and Thing Studio independently selected Shelter, so their nominations are brought together here as a shared entry. Their comments are presented separately below.

Nebbia: Shelter is not only about buildings, but about a way of living, making, and relating to the world through craft, experimentation, rejection of the norm, improvisation, human presence. All things that are central to the way we approach our lives and work. Looking at this book is not because of nostalgia, but the possibility of finding a way forward, looking at an architecture that is as much emotional and cultural as it is physical.

Thing Studio: As we formed THING we pooled our skills and our resources. In this agglomeration our individual libraries were brought together and with this came three separate copies of Shelter. How could we not choose this book? It provides constant inspiration in the examples it illustrates, but perhaps even more importantly in the ethos of its own creation and in the world view it embodies. It looks at the way humans have afforded themselves shelter from cave dwellings, earth huts and tents through to plastic geodesics and inflatable architecture of the ‘counterculture’. It treats these things the same, just humans affording shelter, no judgement or hierarchy, just wonder at the diversity, wisdom and ingenuity. We think this book, first published in 1973, resonates today as we strive for more nature based, regenerative and low carbon ways of building it become ever more important to look to the incredibly evolved technologies of local vernaculars. At the same time, it is a moment to harness the radical optimistic spirit which drove the ‘counterculture’ to do things differently, challenge convention and build a better way forward. This book is optimistic, open source, and empowering, please have a read.

A Pattern Language. Christopher Alexander, 1977.

Chosen by Studio Saar

Saar means essence in Sanskrit and its an idea that meaningful architecture begins by uncovering what is already present in a place, its people, and its living systems. We found that conviction in A Pattern Language before we had language for it ourselves. Alexander understood that buildings are not objects but relationships between light and inhabitation, material and craft, community and care. Working across India and the UK, we see this constantly: a woven bamboo canopy in Udaipur maintained by local weavers, a community-led masterplan in Frome shaped by years of patient listening, reclaimed steel from a demolished building reused to make a working farm net-zero. Different cultures and climates, but the same underlying principle, that places thrive when they are rooted in the social, ecological, and material life around them. What makes the book endure is its insistence that architecture belongs to everyone who makes and inhabits it. Alexander gave craftspeople, communities, and architects equal agency in shaping the built environment. That is how we work, through dialogue, through making, through long-term stewardship rather than short-term delivery. Today we would call what Alexander was describing a regenerative approach: designing with living systems, not upon them. For us, A Pattern Language is where that thinking begins.

A Time of Gifts. Patrick Leigh Fermour, 1977.

Chosen by Mooradian Studio

What strikes me most about Fermor’s travel memoirs is that they remind us of our shared human values. They celebrate generosity over consumerism, repair over replacement, inheritance over acquisition, and lived experience over spectacle. Those aren’t just literary themes, they’re enduring principles that inform design, use of materials, and the relationship between people and place.

Delirious New York. Rem Koolhaas, 1978.

Chosen by General Office

There are many things we love about this book. At this particular moment, we are most concerned with its productive handling of contradictions: idealism and realism; pragmatism and fantasy; public and private; collective and individual; capitalism and socialism; synthetic and natural; city and landscape; rational and surreal. We like contradictions.

Edwin Lutyens. David Dunster, ed, 1979.

Chosen by fardaa

Plans, composition of volumes and landscape, and designing character. And plans again.

SITE: Architecture as Art. SITE, Pierre Restany and Bruno Zevi, 1980.

Chosen by Site Office

SITE’s Best Stores have always been at the back of my mind when designing. They manage to turn what is the most banal brief and context into the most exciting projects. This is not just through their ideas, but also through the execution of the design. This book covers both aspects with essays, sketches, schematic drawings, models, construction details, site and fabrication photos as well as photos of the finished buildings. It is the most detailed book you can find on these projects.

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. William H Whyte, 1980.

Chosen by Context Office

This book and the approach it represents are pretty foundational for how we try to practise urban design! The book is a seminal work that looks to understand how we actually use public space through observation with an open mind, in order to inform design. Its timeless findings are about people and how the layout of our everyday spaces, the edges, walls, crossings, corners that we create in the built environment can allow for inhabitation and chance, life and interaction.

From Bauhaus to Our House. Tom Wolfe, 1981.

Chosen by Nikjoo

This was one of the first architecture books given to me as an intern in a New York architecture practice. Since reading it multiple times since then, I have slowly understood more of the book and of architecture itself. Agree or disagree with Wolfe, it’s a good reminder that cynicism and wit create architecture that can be enjoyed by everyone.

The English Terraced House. Stefan Muthesius, 1982.

Chosen by Gouldstone and Co.

This book explores the history, design and social evolution of Britain’s most ubiquitous dwelling. It challenges the prejudice that terraced housing was merely a monotonous compromise, celebrating it as a sophisticated, adaptable, and highly efficient urban model. It is a book that highlights the amazing background quality of most of our towns and cities. Interestingly architects and architectural movements are almost entirely absent from the book.

London, The Unique City. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, 1983.

Chosen by Pinzauer

When I arrived in London over fifteen years ago, I remember the many discussions with friends and colleagues about the city’s distinct ‘picturesque attitude’, as described by Jonathan Sergison in his paper The picturesque as an urban condition, so different from the European cities I lived and grew up in. A good architect friend and old Londoner recommended I read Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s London: The Unique City. The title was evocative. I found a lightly patinated second edition print that completely transformed how I saw and understood the city. As a foreign architect living and working in London, I found that Rasmussen’s intimate study of the city’s particular form and character resonated deeply with me. Like him, I was observing the city through an outsider’s lens, yet with an architect’s eye. His book allowed me to recognise London’s singular history and its complex relationship to the Continent. Rasmussen captures how London’s unique scattered growth, in contrast to the rigid, concentrated planning of continental capital cities, deeply influences the city’s culture and urban environment. For me, it is more than a book on town planning; it is a recurring reference on London’s political, cultural and social history that still informs how I comprehend and shape the fabric of the city I now call home.

Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment. Matrix, 1984.

Chosen by Edit

We’re always recommending this book, particularly chapter five. Forty two years after it was first published, Matrix’s feminist critique of architecture is still incredibly relevant. The book shows how power shapes not only buildings and cities, but also the ways architecture is learned, practised and talked about. Housing, care, domestic labour, public space and participation are all treated as architectural questions. Written collectively and accessibly, Making Space is incredibly well researched and incisive. It unpacks housing design and space standards as political projects and continues to challenge who architecture is for, whose experiences are centred, and whose knowledge matters. It should be at the beginning of every architecture student’s reading list.

Models & Constructs: margin notes to a design culture. Norman Potter, 1990.

Chosen by DGN Studio

An endearing account of a life designing and making small, yet deeply considered things. Potter’s account of his workshop in Corsham in the 1950s beautifully describes the efforts to maintain a rigorous and thriving practice among all the inevitable contingencies of life – relationships, tricky clients, how to make it all pay. The images of the work described are tantalisingly oblique (Potter distrusted the ‘persuasive image’), and make us want to learn more. The book is opinionated, humorous, and inspires a sense that the smallest details matter. It leaves us with a desire to take on in our own way the challenge of ‘putting things together in ways that make sense.’

Juliaan Lampens: 1950-1991. Juliaan Lampens / Paul Vermeulen / Exhibitions International, 1991 (2020 re.).

Chosen by James Alder Architects

It’s a reminder to be brave.

Mortensen: Collages 1990-91. Richard Mortensen, 1992.

Chosen by Saqqra

Spontaneity, composition, form, colour, context, contradiction.

Pictures from Home. Larry Sultan, 1992.

Chosen by Scapolan Burney Architects

The author’s difficulty in progressing with his project and his family’s reaction to his portrait is a visual representation of the architect’s struggle but also the reward on each project

The Glasgow School of Art: Charles Rennie Mackintosh – Architecture in Detail. James Macaulay, 1993; this edition 2002.

Chosen by Wadhal

When I was eighteen years old, I went up to Glasgow for my interview at the School of Art, and immediately fell in love with the Mackintosh Building. I went on to study architecture there, and have many happy – or sometimes, not so happy – memories of the Mack. The approach of not just designing a building, but everything inside it – from bespoke metalwork and glass to furniture – informs how we practise today. We always like to control as many elements as we can, to give each project a consistent narrative identity. Something that I find the Mackintosh Building does particularly well is balance contradictory spaces – moving from darkness into light, from tight, almost crypt-like spaces, into open galleries with sweeping views of the city below. Now that the Mackintosh has burned down, I can only revisit it in memory, and through books like this one. – Fahad Malik, Wadhal

S, M, L, XL. OMA, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, 1995.

Chosen by Dowen Farmer Architects

What stays with us about this book is its appetite for complexity. It treats architecture as something larger than buildings. It is interested in systems, behaviours, economics, infrastructures, culture and all the unexpected ways they collide. Much of our work begins in these collisions. Like our own work, the book is less concerned with finding the right answer than asking better questions. It serves as a reminder that architecture is rarely a neat, linear process. It is messy, contradictory and shaped by forces far beyond the site boundary. The most rewarding projects are rarely the simplest.

Tony Fretton. Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1995.

Chosen by Studio Benjamin Machin

This copy of Tony Fretton’s first GG has already had more than one life. I bought it second hand as an undergraduate student in Liverpool, where reading was for me as much an education as the design studio or lecture hall. It was originally signed to another (‘Sarah’, I think) many years ago, and then oversigned when I brought it to lunch with Tony in 2022. It feels right to place it in a library where it can continue to move between people for the summer – something like a sabbatical – rather than remain fixed on my shelf. I return to Fretton’s work for its clarity and its tensions. For my practice and teaching, it is a reminder that architecture begins with attention – the discipline to really see what is already there – and proceeds through careful adjustment rather than imposition. It seems fitting that the book continues to circulate.

The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Juhani Pallasmaa, 1996.

Chosen by Daniel Koo Architects

The book is a powerful reminder that architecture operates on many levels of experience beyond the purely visual. In an image-saturated world, where architecture is so often judged through photography, marketing, and media representation, these forces can effectively determine the perceived “success” or “failure” of projects and practices. The pressure to conform to these modes of consumption – sometimes at the expense of the work itself – is immense. While architects inevitably have to respond to and operate within the conditions of their time, the book offers both solace and encouragement not to lose sight of the richness, depth, and experiential possibilities of the medium we practise in.

Undesigning the Bath. Leonard Koren, 1996.

Chosen by Jonathan Woodward Architect

Ten Japanese soaking tubs (Ofuro) installed in a ski resort-style gondola, venture out beyond a promontory, 150 metres above the sea, before stopping and gently rocking. 10 to 15 minutes later, the bathers return. Koren has been an important author for me because his ideas and examples can be enjoyed on many levels. His publications on Japanese stone gardens, a flower shop in Vienna and the definition of Wabi-Sabi can be appreciated simply for aesthetic pleasure. For those who yearn for meaning, there is always depth there too. I first held a copy of this book through a loan from my tutor. This gave extra weight to every word and image. I held it and protected it until I gracefully returned it unscathed. It wasn’t just the book but the ideas that I wanted to protect. The elemental, earthy, and poetic experiences that Koren describes are all that I aspire to achieve.

Herzog & de Meuron 1978 – 1988 (The Complete Works Volume 1). Gerhard Mack, 1997.

Chosen by William Guthrie Architect

Herzog & de Meuron 1978 – 1988 (The Complete Works Volume 1) Birkhäuser Verlag 1997 Documenting 20 of the practice’s most significant projects in the first ten years of its life, the book’s inclusion in the POST PRESS library is all the more apt for the fact that Pierre de Meuron and Jacques Herzog conceived and completed every one before the age of forty – a fact at once astonishing and profoundly humbling. The work of Herzog & de Meuron has remained a constant source of fascination for me since, like many millennial architects, I encountered Tate Modern as a teenager – but it is to these earlier projects, discovered subsequently, that I am most firmly attached. In returning to the pages of this book (as I do, regularly), I am struck by the extraordinary confidence of the work and the conspicuous absence of ‘style’, each project a rigorous, independent exercise in thinking and making. We occupy a different world to the one inhabited by the young Jacques and Pierre in the eighties – but through the pages of this extraordinary book I am reminded of the things that matter most in architecture, and why I still participate in this wonderful (if at times painfully frustrating) discipline.

John Pawson Works. Deyan Sudjic, 2000.

Chosen by _underscore architecture

John Pawson is a constant source of inspiration for our practice. His reduction to the absolutely essential, to what is “right”, speaks to our aesthetic and environmental pursuit. His interventions are beautiful and considered in every sense. But his works also speak on a deeper level of our belief that architecture simply facilitates life. That the life and relationships that happen in and around it are the things to be treasured and sought after, and that an architecture of excess or pretence should not get in the way of that.

Sir John Soane The Royal Academy Lectures. David Watkin, 2000.

Chosen by Connolly Wellingham Architects

“We must be intimately acquainted with not only what the ancients have done, but endeavour to learn from their works what they would have done. We shall thereby become artists not mere copyists. We shall not be led astray by fashion and prejudice, in a vain pursuit after novelty, but contemplate with increased satisfaction the glorious remains of antiquity.”

Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity, and Human Nature. Daniel Nettle, 2001.

Chosen by T Parsons Design

Nettle describes a link between mental illness and creativity which rings very true for me. Staying well while riding the creative highs and lows of practice is sometimes a struggle. Aiming to better understand it, learn to live with it, and perhaps even harness it is greatly aided by the insight in this book.

Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works. David Robson, 2002.

Chosen by PAN-Projects

This book is important to our practice because Geoffrey Bawa was one of the earliest and strongest architectural influences on PAN-Projects, and his work continues to shape how we think about space, culture, and architectural practice today. Co-founder Kazumasa studied this book extensively during his BA studies while writing his thesis on Bawa’s design philosophy, and the copy itself still contains notes and annotations that remain foundational to our thinking. Although our projects emerge from different climates and contexts, we continue to find inspiration in Bawa’s ability to assemble diverse cultural, religious, material, and architectural elements without hierarchy. Educated in the UK and practised in Sri Lanka, Bawa developed an architectural language that was simultaneously international and critically regional. His spaces effortlessly bring together objects, techniques, and references from different regions and traditions, not as symbols or statements, but as naturally coexisting parts of a larger spatial atmosphere. That spirit strongly resonates with PAN-Projects. Even the name of our studio derives from the prefix “pan-”, expressing our interest in architecture as a practice of fabricating diverse elements into a coherent whole. This book remains one of the clearest and most complete documents of Bawa’s life, work, and philosophy.

Beach Houses: Andrew Geller. Alastair Gordon, 2003.

Chosen by Christian Brailey Architects

The Bra. The Box Kite. The Cat. The Milk Carton. The Reclining Picasso. Whimsical vacation homes reflecting the idea of summer.

On the Atlantic Edge: A Geopoetics Project. Kenneth White, 2006.

Chosen by BARD

On the Atlantic Edge” is an illuminating guide for all who are interested in the poetics of place. It connects storytelling, heritage, and the deep-rooted bond between people and land over time. Kenneth White used the concept of “Geopoetics” to describe the Atlantic Arc, showing ties across space and time. For BARD, this book is a mirror. It helps shape our manifesto on how we weave a thread through the intricate tapestry of the communities where we work, telling new allegories as we build.

Flights. Olga Tokarczuk, 2007.

Chosen by Owain Williams

Structurally composed of short, often incongruous anecdotes and vignettes, this constellation novel reminds us that in life, nothing takes a static form. Instead of a linear path, Tokarczuk fills in an understanding of the world based entirely on fleeting moments and subjective experience. For us this holds up a mirror to how we interact with our environment– not as detached observers of a fixed state, but through fragmented sequences of movement, perception, and drift. Flights posits that a “place” is never purely physical, but an ephemeral construct continuously reshaped by the wanderers passing through it. Identity isn’t rooted in fixed geography, but fluidly negotiated through movement and time. It reminds us that architects should look beyond the rigidity of the now and inspires us to design for human transience. Things to be remembered and things to be forgotten.

Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary. Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa, 2007.

Chosen by Studio Armitage

Super Normal is important to Studio Armitage because it articulates a way of thinking about design that feels both disciplined and enduring. Morrison and Fukasawa give serious attention to the ordinary object: not as something neutral or incidental, but as something refined through use, proportion, familiarity and repeated contact with daily life. That position resonates strongly with the way the practice approaches architecture. Studio Armitage is interested in buildings, interiors and objects that are carefully made, materially grounded and quietly assured. Much of our work is shaped by natural materials, crafted construction and a close attention to how things age, settle and are inhabited over time. In that context, Super Normal is a useful reminder that quality does not depend upon novelty or display. It can reside in clarity, restraint and the precise calibration of form, material and use. The book also reflects an idea that is central to the practice: that the lasting value of design often reveals itself slowly. What matters is not only the first impression, but the way something enters everyday life, acquires familiarity, and deepens through continued use.

Aldo Van Eyck. Writings. Vincent Ligtelijn, Francis Strauven, 2008.

Chosen by Ludwig Willis Architects

Aldo Van Eyck’s work has been a recurring reference in our practice and teaching. ‘The Shape of the In-between’ reminds us how the positive relationship between a building and its context can enrich and deepen the way we experience our cities, full of complexity and contradictions. Creating spaces for children in a meaningful and imaginative way is central in our approach to education projects. Rather than viewing schools as purely institutional buildings, we see them as places of discovery, independence and social collaboration.

North by North West: The life and work of Liam McCormick. Paul Larmour and Shane O’Toole, 2008.

Chosen by Arigho Larmour Wheeler Architects

North by Northwest: The Life and Work of Liam McCormick is important to our practice because it reflects many of the ideas that shape how we think about architecture. McCormick’s work was closely connected to the landscapes, communities and building traditions of north-west Ireland, and his projects show how contemporary architecture can grow from a strong understanding of place. The book also has a personal significance for us. It was co-written by Paul Larmour, a respected architectural historian and the father of our director, Jane Larmour. Through both family and professional connections, the book forms part of an ongoing conversation about architecture, heritage and the importance of place. What we value most in McCormick’s work is his careful response to context. His buildings were modern without losing touch with local character, materials and culture. This approach continues to be relevant to our own practice, particularly in projects involving historic buildings, rural landscapes and existing communities. For us, the book is an important record of an architect whose work demonstrates the value of designing with an understanding of place. It serves as a useful reference and a reminder that good architecture can be inventive, contemporary and rooted in its surroundings.

Kilimanjaro, No 9. Michael Olu Odukoya / OMA Creates, 2009.

Chosen by Morales Finch

Not strictly a book, it is however open to constant reinterpretation (as are books) and physical reconfiguration (perhaps less so). The magazine, to which we were contributors as students, taking part in our first architectural projects with its publisher, is still a constant point of reference and reflection. The content, by virtue of being loose-bound and consisting of smaller individual components are constantly being mixed and regrouped, but this is not important as it is backed by such a rigorous and robust conceptual intent that they retain a coherance even when encountered not as originally intended. It demands engagement and the taking of a position as opposed to passive observation, which we believe in a great deal. It is not architectural in nature, and we rarely adopt architectural references in our work, so this feels like an honest expression of our interests and instincts. As architects, we endeavour to one day produce work of such equivalent depth and owe a lot to what was learnt in those early collaborations.

Studies in Organic. Kengo Kuma & Associates, 2009.

Chosen by PiM.studio Architects

This book is very important to us. It was the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name at Gallery MA in Tokyo, which opened months after we joined the practice in Japan. It was a period of great creativity and growing international reputation at Kengo Kuma & Associates, and being part of it had a strong influence on our approach to architecture and our practice. The colleagues we worked with at the time were a special creative generation of Japanese architects; some have since started their own studios, as we did, while others are now partners at KKAA. This book is also a beautiful graphic project with an unfolding cover printed in disappearing ink.

How Bad are Bananas. Mike Berners-Lee, 2010.

Chosen by Arbor Architects

How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee has become a really valuable touchstone for us at Arbor Architects. It takes something as complex as carbon accounting and makes it feel grounded in everyday life – comparing things like a cup of tea, a flight, or even a banana in ways that are easy to grasp and, at times, genuinely surprising. Those kinds of references have made a lasting impression on how we think. We often find ourselves recalling them when weighing up decisions – whether that’s choosing between materials, considering reuse over new construction, or even reflecting on the impact of travel. It’s helped turn carbon from an abstract metric into something we can intuitively understand and discuss as a team. Because of this, the book has played a big role in building our collective carbon literacy. It’s shaped the way we approach projects and the conversations we have with clients.

Louis Kahn: On the Thoughtful Making of Spaces. Michael Merrill, 2010; 2021 edition.

Chosen by Erbar Mattes

The book chronicles the design development of Kahn’s unbuilt Dominican Motherhouse. It follows the practice’s relationship with the client and their relentless search for the “form” of the building, while grappling with budget constraints and the functional demands of the brief over a two-year period. It’s humbling to see how the scheme evolves through several iterations, with elements constantly questioned, repositioned and often stripped away in search of meaning, while the realities of a tight budget continually threaten its existence. It reminds us that the design process is rarely straightforward, and that it is often through moments of uncertainty that the most valuable ideas emerge.

Accounts. Various / The AE Foundation, 2011.

Chosen by Scapolan Burney Architects

Accounts is a record of conversations that took place among members and invited guests of the AE Foundation. It includes lectures and interviews with architects and educators who have influenced my architectural education and approach.

Inside Out: Architecture New York City. Diane Lewis, February 2011.

Chosen by CAKE Architecture

Defines a way of reading the city, is places, spaces and buildings as compositional strategy of tectonic forms, all of this is through a lens of poetic imagination which brings the practice of making space alive and weaves a narrative between places and practitioners though time. Amazing book that has been central to the creative process in our studio.

The Edifice Complex. Deyan Sudjic, 2011.

Chosen by Jas Bhalla Works

The Edifice Complex by Deyan Sudjic argues that architecture is often driven as much by power, ego, ambition, and politics as by practical needs or artistic ideals. Sudjic shows that behind many iconic structures lies a complex mix of vision, vanity, competition, and the desire to shape how history remembers those who commission them. As architects and masterplanners interested in designing buildings and places rooted in socio-economic context, the book remains highly relevant.

WindowScape Window Behaviourology. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory, 2011.

Chosen by Msoma

It captures the idea that architecture and culture are inseparable, each informing and reshaping the other. This exchange is central to what Msoma represents as a practice and what the project sets out to explore. WindowScape moves across geographies, collecting windows from significant works of architecture as cultural artefacts in themselves – traces of climate, ritual, technology, privacy, and habitation. Each window reveals a particular way of living, showing how architecture absorbs the conditions of culture while simultaneously producing new spatial experiences. The project examines how these conditions can be synthesised into different expressions of the same whole: varied architectural responses emerging from shared human needs, yet articulated through distinct cultural, environmental, and material languages.

Miroslav Šik Architecture 1988–2012. Heinz Wirz, ed, with an essay by Miroslav Šik, 2012.

Chosen by Studio Bua

The idea for Studio Bua solidified at the Venice Biennale in 2012 – it took another five years to happen! We went to the opening of the Swiss pavilion and heard Miroslav Šik introduce “And Now the Ensemble!” and found kinship with his approach to architecture as an integral part of the existing landscape and disinterest in architecture as Icon. We bought this book at the pavilion and it’s now part of the studio library.

Poppo Pingel: Auroville Architects Monograph Series. Mona Doctor-Pingel, 2012.

Chosen by Artefact

The chance discovery of this book in a Mumbai bookshop many years ago led us to Poppo Pingel’s work and ultimately to visit some of his buildings in Auroville. The book documents Pingel’s journey into architecture via carpentry, and this grounding in craft, and attitude towards elemental construction and expressing the way things are built is something that chimes with our approach at Artefact. Pingel’s experimentations with alternative materials, and in particular with buildings made from earth underfoot are an inspiration for the material research we are undertaking in the studio and feel as relevant today as ever. The book documents the pragmatism and poetry of his work. Timber columns are supported on boulders, rough hewn stone columns land in ponds, oversailing roofs define sociable outdoor spaces, and plants grow up against the edge of buildings. His is a sensory architecture, part practical and part spiritual, and his spatial and material imagination is something we strive for in our work.

Architecture Words 12 – Stones Against Diamonds. Lina Bo Bardi / Brett Steele, 2013.

Chosen by Urban Radicals

Culture over luxury. “From Miesian precision to a dialogue with the vernacular.” “An awareness of a reality goes hand in hand with a political awareness, with regard to both economics and the architect’s sense of moral responsibility.” It is also important to us as Bo Bardi practised as an immigrant.

Borrowed City. Motoelastico; Marco Bruno, Simone Carena, Minji Kim, 2013.

Chosen by Fisher Cheng

The city is the ultimate public space to be ‘borrowed’ by us all, we can look to Seoul as in the case of this book, for elegant, humorous and tenacious negotiations of public space in ways that mirror our own attitude towards the public realm.

Carl Larsson: Friends & Enemies. Various / Nationalmuseum Stockholm, 2013.

Chosen by Brisco Loran

The ‘book’ is a catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, held at Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum in 2013. Covering the life of the artist Carl Larsson, the catalogue includes a series of paintings depicting his home ‘Lilla Hyttnäs’ at Sundborn, which was gradually reworked, furnished, and decorated by his partner Karin Bergöö. Both Karin’s design work and Carl’s paintings are very beautiful and hold much to remind us of how healthy homes might emerge.

City as a Project. Pier-Vittorio Aureli, 2013.

Chosen by Of Architecture

The City as a Project, edited by Pier-Vittorio Aureli, is a book we return to constantly – not as a historical survey but as a provocation. Aureli was my tutor, and studying under him sharpened a way of reading the city that we have never been able to unlearn: that urbanism is never accidental, never merely the residue of economic forces, but always the outcome of deliberate political and architectural intention. What draws us to this collection above almost any other text is its refusal to privilege any single tradition. Its eight essays span more than two millennia and move between the Islamic city, Renaissance Rome, Mesoamerican urbanism, the Fordist factory floor, and the laissez-faire Greek city. Each case insists that architecture – specific, argued, positioned – is the instrument through which cities are made legible and contested. Yet the book has not reached Asia. For us, that absence is as generative as the text itself – an invitation to ask whether the same thesis holds when tested against the imperial grid of Beijing, the colonial harbour of Hong Kong, the compressed density of Tokyo, or the rapid and deliberate reinvention of Seoul. Do those cities also arise from deliberate architectural intention, or do they resist the framework entirely? That question sits at the centre of our practice and thinking.

Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Tim Ingold, 2013.

Chosen by Other People’s Dreams

OPD utilise active participation and co-production to create architectural and spatial interventions that allow local people to test new possibilities within the places that they live, work and play. However, despite a growing appreciation of participation within community architecture, these processes often compel people to participate in the work passively, through post-it notes and clipboards, rather than allowing the work to iteratively participate in the place. Instead, we utilise collaborative making as an analytical, engagement, design and pedagogical tool, and believe that tacit knowledge acquired through making is more powerful and effective when working in community contexts. In this book, anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that through making, practice and experience, knowledge is transferred between the different actors involved, while the Maker (architect, resident, volunteer, user, technician, passer-by) simultaneously observes, documents, analyses and creates. Making is therefore re-positioned not as a finite act but as a series of empathic and responsive actions that situate the maker within the physical, cultural and social conditions of ordinary life. It therefore allows participation in architecture to be a symbiotic mode of practice, whereby the architect is as much a participant in the context they are exploring as the community is in the design process.

Less is Enough. Pier Vittorio Aureli, 2014.

Chosen by badweather

Less is Enough was a key text during our time as students, and it has continued to inform our role as designers and the close relationship between our work and our lives. Most of our projects have existed in counter-cultural spaces, where constrained material and financial capital demands inherent resourcefulness with materials and labour. In an era of social and environmental crisis, this book anchors our commitment to radical sufficiency and the core rituals of life that architecture hosts. It reminds us that restraint is not about sacrifice, but about creating an abundance of meaning and community value through the simplest means.

Ruffneck Constructivists. Kara Walker, curator, 2014.

Chosen by bafalw

Ruffneck Constructivist was published to accompany a group exhibition curated by Kara Walker in 2014. It brought together 11 artists across various disciplines, who Walker quoted as being ‘defiant shapers of environments’. The thoughts expressed in this publication can be seen as an invitation to be bold and daring. In turn, it lifts the limitations that typically define the work of an architectural practice. As a collective, our work and interests lie at the intersection of art, architecture, film and design. We are interested in how space can be created and curated through platforms and programmes that engage culture and community.

The Inhabited Pathway: The Built Work of Alberto Ponis in Sardinia. Sebastiano Brandolini, ed, 2014.

Chosen by Baillie Baillie Architects

Building as a direct response to landscape, climate, and locality. A low-tech modern architecture, working within a vernacular tradition.

Bookkeeping & Accounting for Dummies. Jane Kelly, 2015.

Chosen by A IS FOR ARCHITECTURE

Architects tend to read books that say the things they already know. Our submission offers a different take – a book that everyone that runs a business should read, but no one will talk about at a dinner party or at the Venice Biennale. Architects need to take business matters into their own hands, understand how money is made and lost and what drives their clients’ and collaborators’ needs and ambitions. Only then can we really change things for the communities we serve.

David Lea: An Architect of Principle. Adam Voelcker, 2015.

Chosen by Benjamin Hale Architects

This copy of David Lea: An Architect of Principle was gifted to me by Chris Loyn. David Lea practised from Eryri for nearly fifty years, creating work that demonstrated how buildings could emerge from deep attention to place, fabric, and natural materials. His approach and his lifetime’s work at Ogoronwy show how careful and thoughtful interventions can marry new and old in challenging contexts without pastiche or apology. For a practice working on listed buildings and conversions across Wales, often in National Park settings, Lea’s principles of honesty, restraint, and architecture rooted in place continue to inform. The book carries a sense of continuity, passed to me by another Welsh architect, which feels appropriate for work fundamentally about connecting past, present, and landscape. Lea died in 2022. I would have loved to meet him. In a strange way, I feel like I already know him.

Working in Architecture. Jamie Fobert Architects, 2015.

Chosen by Bindloss Dawes

Working in Architecture by Jamie Fobert Architects is a book that crystalises much of our formative experience, outlining projects where George and Oliver first collaborated. It also describes a way of working that has informed our own and shows how the personal journey of an architect can be embedded in architecture. The book describes Jamie Fobert Architects’ organic approach to the design process. One that avoids prescription, remaining open to the possibilities of a project throughout its design and construction, and allowing each project to find its own expression. While architecture requires control, it also benefits from openness and flexibility. In our studio, we have learnt to anticipate change and to accommodate it intelligently, allowing ideas to emerge unexpectedly through making, collaboration, and context. Working in Architecture teaches us to develop your own eye, work with restraint, be consistent in your approach rather than your style and allow time for your voice to take shape through practice.

Dom Hans van der Laan, in Practice. Caroline Voet, 2017.

Chosen by ojma

This is by no means a bible to me or my practice but is certainly a book that felt like a turning point in my education and practice – I believe it is a reprint or version of an earlier copy. This is in part as I have always found academic literature and theory difficult and unsure how to relate to how I work where I feel more driven by form and composition. It certainly allowed me to feel more comfortable moving forward in my practice. I would not pretend to understand all of the principles but it definitely awakened something in me and gave a sense of being on the right path. The spaces, although materially austere, are composed with such an odd yet formal rigour that create truly beautiful spaces.

Absurd Thinking between Art and Design. Allan Wexler, edited by Ashley Simone, 2017.

Chosen by Studio Charlotte Harris

Allan and Ellen Wexler’s work re-evaluates assumptions about our relationship to our surroundings, both built and natural.

From the Factory to the Metropolis. Antonio Negri, 2018.

Chosen by Unit 38

Negri’s analysis of the impact of deindustrialisation on the metropolis, it’s stratifications and enclosures, gives us insights into how ‘the common’ can be mobilised to create new spaces in the city.

Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City. Naoya Hatakeyama; Yasufumi Nakamori, ed, 2018.

Chosen by Conrad Koslowsky Architects

In an age where everyone is a photographer, a beautifully printed photography book remains a rare delight. Naoya Hatakeyama’s Excavating the Future City is one such treasure. Having grown up on the Canadian prairies with easy access to wilderness, I was struck (when studying in London) by how differently Europeans perceive nature. This shaped my understanding that all nature is altered by humans, whether physically or through our idealised aesthetic portrayal of it. In an era of environmental crises, architects must address cultural attitudes to nature, not just technical responses. We need to move beyond the outdated human-nature divide that contributes to the prevalence of green-washing. Hatakeyama’s work searches for a new topography and a fresh lens on contemporary landscape. His photographs are matter-of-fact, yet they carry a sublime beauty. He finds it in unexpected places (sewers, excavations) challenging simplistic notions of the natural world. By decontextualising his subjects, he makes the familiar feel alien. Without overt judgement, he is clearly critical of humanity’s impact on the planet. He shifts between freezing time, evoking past and future, and varying scale and vantage point. The result is a quietly powerful, ambiguous body of work that demands we reconsider our relationship with nature.

Run Studio Run. Eli Altman, 2018.

Chosen by Kasawoo

Run Studio Run is a fun and useful read that inspired us to look at our studio more critically – as a business as opposed to an artistic endeavour.

Thresholds: Space, Time and Practice. Neri & Hu Design and Research Office, 2020.

Chosen by Studio Mango

A beautiful, considered monograph documenting the practice where myself and Utsav met before forming Studio Mango. The precisely documented works exhibit many of the spatial and material qualities we seek in our own work.

The Lived Experience of Our Streets. NOOMA Studio, 2021.

Chosen by NOOMA Studio

The Lived Experience of Our Streets is important to our practice because it captures many of the questions that sit at the heart of our work: how people experience places in everyday life, whose stories are represented in the public realm, and how design can respond to memory, identity and belonging. Commissioned by Cross River Partnership and Westminster City Council, the publication explores how lived experience can become a meaningful tool for understanding and shaping streets, moving beyond conventional measures of movement, infrastructure and land use. Through interviews, observations, mapping and community engagement, it highlights the social and emotional dimensions of place that are often overlooked within design processes. At NOOMA Studio, the publication continues to inform how we approach public realm, regeneration and community-led projects. It has helped shape our engagement methodologies and our belief that local knowledge should not simply be consulted, but actively contribute to design development. Many of our projects, including Shine a Light on Wilcox Road, Leathermarket Gardens and Holcombe Market, build upon principles first explored through this research. For us, the publication is both a reference and a reminder that successful places are shaped not only by physical interventions, but by the everyday experiences of the people who inhabit them.

Aalto in Detail. Celine Dietziker and Lukas Gruntz, 2022.

Chosen by Studio MAY

This book is a more visual addition to the library and has acted as a source of inspiration when we’re working through a detail, and often pushed us to pursue a more ambitious design.

Proportion in Art and Architecture. Michael Schneider, 2022.

Chosen by MW-A

We tend to use systems of proportion in all of our projects and this book is a very good introduction to the many ways in which one can do that.

The Dusty Knuckle: Seriously Good Bread, Knockout Sandwiches and Everything in Between. Daisy Terry, Rebecca Oliver and Max Tobias, 2022.

Chosen by Medium

Bread seems to be central to our practice, whether it be a loaf shared during a work lunch, the design of a house for a baking family, or an ongoing research project exploring how bread links land, table and body. This book holds many shared recipes, but also reminders of how food can do much more than just feed – it can build purpose, community and belonging. Our architecture strives to do the same.

architect, verb. Reinier de Graaf, 2023.

Chosen by ByOthers

Do things. All the time. Don’t worry too much, just go for it. Architects are verbs. (if you’re a noun, this isn’t the book for you)

Heinrich Tessenow Annäherungen und ikonische Projekte. Martin Boesch, 2023.

Chosen by Nick Hill Architects

I first encountered Tessenow through his drawings of domestic architecture: those carefully penned sketches, at once elegantly concise yet brilliantly descriptive. There is an enjoyable tension in his drawings – between what he chooses to include and what he doesn’t – that makes them feel so thoughtful and precise, like he’s reducing the image only to those ingredients essential to the character of the proposition. For example, with only a couple of additional lines, an ordinary downpipe, added to a view of the rear elevation of a house, casually evokes a quiet atmosphere of comfortable domesticity. It’s this focus on the associative value of things, and the specific atmospheres they can bring to architecture, that is one of the inspirations for my own work. This book provides a much broader understanding of Tessenow’s career, which spans well beyond those cosy domestic scenes. It’s an intriguing body of work, from a fascinating period in European architectural history, where tradition and modernity intersected, and the relationship between craft and industry was constantly being reassessed. Now, a hundred years on, and for very different reasons, that relationship is again being examined and Tessenow’s work is an enjoyable reference for inspiration.

Analogue Images. Rory Gardiner and Maxime Delvaux, 2024.

Chosen by AO-FT

This book brings together photographs by two of our favourite contemporary architectural photographers. As architects, we are particularly interested in the ways buildings become embedded within their context and everyday life. For us, both Gardiner and Delvaux capture this relationship through compositions that feel natural, immediate, and uncontrived.

Exposing the Barriers in Architecture, from a FAME Perspective. Tumpa Husna Yasmin Fellows, 2024.

Chosen by Our Building Design

Exposing the Barriers in Architecture from a FAME Perspective is an important contribution to ongoing debates on equity, diversity, and inclusion within architectural education and practice. Drawing on extensive research, the book responds to the urgent need to better understand how race, gender, class, and other intersecting identities shape the experiences of practitioners, academics, students, and emerging professionals within the built environment. Through personal testimonies, research findings, and critical analysis, the book exposes the structural barriers that continue to affect underrepresented groups in architecture. Importantly, it moves beyond identifying challenges to offer practical recommendations, pathways to success, and examples of resilience from members of FAME (Female Architects of Minority Ethnic) and allied practitioners. The research was further disseminated through the exhibition Exposing the Barriers in Architecture, from a FAME Perspective at RIBA, extending its reach beyond academia and creating a platform for dialogue between students, educators, practitioners, and policymakers. For educators, practitioners, students, policymakers, and institutions, the book provides valuable insights into creating a more equitable profession. It serves as both a record of lived experience and a resource for change, demonstrating how architectural practice and education can be transformed through collective action, advocacy, and inclusive leadership.

Inheritance. David Grandorge, 2024.

Chosen by Cairn

A book I was involved in making with David Grandorge. It provides a wonderful overview of his varied practices and experiences as a photographer, maker and teacher. It describes the development of a thesis by accretion, and begins with a list of buildings that are important to him, which is a great way to start a book.

Material Reform. Material Cultures with Amica Dall, 2024.

Chosen by Material Cultures

We wrote this book in 2022 as a way of consolidating the conversations and ideas that had been circulating through the early years of our practice. It gave us the opportunity to articulate a clear agenda for our work – one concerned with bridging the many siloed and largely invisible processes involved in making buildings, and with reimagining how these might be reconfigured in relation to both human and planetary wellbeing.

Urban Wild Ecology. Fuminori Nousaku and Mio Tsuneyama, 2024.

Chosen by Flimsy Works

Urban Wild Ecology is a collection of projects by Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku, which advocate for ‘wildness’ as a mode of practice. Their projects are made by centring relationships between buildings, habitats, species, organisms, cities and landscapes. We find the remediation of soil health through clever foundation design and considered groundwork in their projects particularly important. The book contains beautiful drawings, which emphasise construction processes as the beating heart of design.

Tea for Two / Chá Para Dois. Graeme Nicholls, 2025.

Chosen by Graeme Nicholls Architects

Tea for Two / Chá para Dois is important to our practice as it brings together direct collaboration with Álvaro Siza and authorship by Graeme Nicholls within a single body of work. The book was developed through ongoing dialogue with Siza, offering a rare opportunity to engage closely with one of the most significant living architects, while examining his Casa de Chá da Boa Nova alongside Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Willow Tearooms. This collaboration shaped the project at every stage. Rather than operating as a detached study, the book emerged through conversation, reflection, and shared enquiry. It reinforced an understanding of architecture as a continuous discipline, where knowledge is developed through exchange and careful observation. As a written work, the publication also reflects the importance we place on authorship within practice. Writing provides a means to test ideas with precision, extending architectural thinking beyond the constraints of individual projects. For the practice, the book represents a convergence of collaboration, research, and design thinking. It continues to inform our approach to material, sequence, and atmosphere, while demonstrating how practice, writing, and dialogue can operate together in a coherent and focused way.

COALFACE/25. Shaun Young and James Longfield, eds, 2026.

Chosen by Northern Bureau for Architecture

Curated by James Longfield and Shaun Young, this exhibition catalogue of COALFACE/25 documents new works from 20 contemporary practices working in the north-east, each produced as an interpretive response to an archival drawing or image that is representative of an aspect of our region’s architectural heritage and character. The curated archival images have all been influential in shaping the character and identity of architecture in the north-east, and are displayed alongside the new responses to reflect on how prominent works of our region’s past might inform (and transform) the way we think and act creatively in the present. Each contribution is supported by a short explainer text. An introductory text ‘Spacewalk North’ by northern poet and writer Alex Niven, frames the north as a space of creative dreaming and innovation. As well as foregrounding significant cultural touchstones that have informed the design trajectories of Northern Bureau for Architecture, the book positions our work within a wider constellation of practice and culture, acknowledging the foundational antecedents and contemporary peers that inspire us.

That’s me on Hackney Marshes, playing for the development team of Clapton Community Football Club. Playing for the team introduced me to this quite exceptional club and to its ground in East London, the Old Spotted Dog Ground. Clapton Community Football Club was formed by supporters in 2018, after a series of ordeals. Through a great deal of hard graft and volunteer labour, they revitalised and repaired this ground in East London, which is now fan-led. They attract between 500 and 1,000 spectators on Saturdays and Sundays, which is quite remarkable for a club with such a modest non-league status.

This is the ground in Forest Gate. It is nestled among Victorian terraces. At the bottom right is a warehouse that the club purchased in 2020 or 2021. Through playing with the club, I told them that I was an architect. I helped them renovate the changing rooms in the warehouse, which then led to the design and construction of a new toilet block. It is sited along the southern side of the ground, in the area shown here by the red rectangle.

Two key inspirations for the building were Ted Cullinan’s house at 62 Camden Mews—I worked for Ted’s practice during my year out—and Walker Evans’s photographs. I have always found the restraint and economy of Cullinan’s building, combined with its expressiveness, very alluring.

In my fifth year, I was introduced to Walker Evans’s work. He photographed façades across America during the early twentieth century. This building, which I think is a church, has a very simple colonnade, a steeple and an arched doorway. Through extremely economical means, it transforms a basic building into something with a strong civic expression. We tried to filter some of those ideas into our building.

This is the plan. It is essentially an inner volume containing the toilet cubicles, with a row of urinals around the back. We’ve tried to get people to use it in an orderly manner, but so far with no success: it becomes a fairly chaotic corridor back there. There are columns on either side, with screens suspended between them.

This is the front façade. We wanted to give it a strong expression—almost a principal façade. This photograph is by Rikard Kahn, who is in the audience tonight. The building uses the colours of the club strip: black, white and red. As with the church, we wanted to use columns to give the building a civic expression. Round columns would have cost too much, so we gave the posts a more pronounced foot to create a base, then played with the proportions of the lapped timbers and introduced a kind of capital to express the connection between the vertical post and the horizontal fascia above.

Inside, the toilets are quite dark, but they offer a momentary reprieve from what can be a frenzied atmosphere outside. For all this talk of giving the building a civic face, it becomes almost invisible during a match, which we didn’t intend but which I quite like. When you do eventually see it, it is almost just a roof hovering slightly above the crowd, with a sense of protection.

The roof has another purpose. When you spend a lot of time at grassroots-football grounds, you spend a lot of time outdoors: you are caught in the rain in winter or the sun in summer. The cantilevered roof was intended to provide shelter in those moments. I think someone stashed a fridge underneath it during the play-off final, which was quite a unique interpretation of the space.

To talk briefly about the design of the building, I became very interested in Peter Märkli after finishing my master’s degree in 2020. During lockdown, I spent a lot of time in my bedroom working on speculative projects and trying to understand his system of proportion.

Courtesy of Drawing Matter Collections. Collection no. DMC 2699.1

This is a drawing by Peter Märkli: a cross-section of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, built in the sixth century.

This is a cross-section through one of Märkli’s buildings, a vast pharmaceutical headquarters in Switzerland, which is about 130 metres long.

This is a cross-section of the toilet block. The common thread between the three is the attempt to use a system of proportion: a rigorous method for generating measurements throughout the building.

For me, there are two main reasons for using proportion. The first is practical or pragmatic: it helps me to make design decisions. Once you determine what I call the base or foundational measurement—which, in the case of the toilet block, was the three-metre height of the roof—the rest can follow from it. I don’t have to spend a great deal of time deliberating over how large or small each element should be. The second reason is that there is an aspiration to make beautiful buildings and beautiful spaces. It feels a little strange to say that. Beauty seems to be very low on many people’s lists today; for me, it is near the top.

To end the presentation, this is a film by Daniel Owusu, who is sitting just here. It is a film about the toilet block, shot during this season’s play-off final, which Clapton won, securing promotion to Step 5. It was a great day.

Maximillian Worrell was speaking at POST PRESS on 14th July 2026.

Links:

MW-A

Clapton Community Football Club

Rikard Kahn

Daniel Owusu

Ben Kelly with Leo Sixsmith, Sophie Mei Birkin and Ollie Brenner of _badweather (Matthew Blunderfield)

Week 5 at POST PRESS is all about performance and kicked off with an evening in which the members of _badweather spoke with the renowned designer Ben Kelly. As architects who have designed extensively for club culture _badweather were particularly keen to talk to Ben about his 1982 design for the Haçienda in Manchester. Here, we present an edited extract of his recollections of that seminal project’s gestation and thoughts about its continuing legacy.

I first went to art school in Lancaster, in the north of England, where I did a foundation course. They happened to offer an interior-design course. This was in the 1960s—I think I went to art school in 1966—and there was a great deal happening in the world. I began to understand what was going on in Italy, where young architects were doing weird and wonderful things. So I applied to the Royal College of Art. That was also a means of getting to London, which was important to me. From afar, I was aware of what was going on. I knew about David Hockney: I knew that he had peroxide-blond hair and had worn a gold lamé suit when he graduated. I thought everybody at the Royal College would look like that. I was incredibly disappointed when I arrived. They were the most boring-looking bunch of people I had ever seen. Then, one day, a group of students came into the canteen. They were from the fashion school and looked incredible—girls with shaved eyebrows. I thought, thank Christ for that. I worked across every department at the Royal College and began making things.

The first job I got was a fashion shop on Long Acre in Covent Garden. This was in 1977 before there was any fashion there, when the area was still functioning as a fruit-and-veg market. That was my starting point. The shop was called Howie, and I was able to use materials I had stored up in my head, drawing on what I knew was happening in the wider world, to make this shop selling fashionable clothes.

Howie (1977), London. Image courtesy of Ben Kelly Design

Peter Saville was a co-founder of Factory Records and he designed the record sleeves. He came to London and we met shortly after he arrived. He had a project to design a record sleeve for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who had previously been on Factory. We met in a bar and he told me that he had an idea for the record sleeve, but didn’t know what to do with it. His rather strange concept was to make a sleeve using the least possible amount of cardboard. I said, “I know exactly what it should be, Peter. Walk down Long Acre and look at this shop called Howie, where I used perforated-steel panels behind the glass panels in the door. It should be a perforated sleeve.” I was interested in process. We met again a couple of days later and I brought the catalogue of APW—Associated Perforators and Weavers—which produced all these different perforated patterns. We chose one, Peter did the artwork and, lo and behold, we had this semi-transparent sleeve: an orange inner sleeve behind a blue outer. It won loads of awards. I thought, I’ll do some more of this. That was my introduction to Factory Records in Manchester.

Joy Division had made their first album and sadly, their singer, Ian Curtis, had died. The band went to New York with their manager, changed their name to New Order and visited all the groovy nightclubs in Manhattan. They came back and said, “We want one. We want our own club.” The idea was discussed among the partners of Factory Records, and they eventually found a building, which they took Peter Saville to see. I think they imagined that he was going to design it. He’s a graphic designer. He looked at it and said, “I have no idea what to do with it, but I know a man who can.” So I got on a train and went up there. They showed me around and asked, “Do you want the job?” Of course I wanted the effing job.

The Haçienda (1982), Manchester. Image courtesy of Ben Kelly Design.

I had never designed a nightclub and the clients had never commissioned one. There was a great deal of naivety and foolhardiness, some might say, but I really do think that was part of its strength. The more drawings we produced, the more they wanted and the more excited they became—until it was built and we realised that we had forgotten the cloakrooms and there weren’t enough toilets. It took years to become what it eventually became.

Tony Wilson, the co-founder of Factory, was an extraordinary person. He had been educated at Cambridge and was a presenter on Granada Television, so he had a day job, while running this record label from a two-bedroom flat in Didsbury. It began to have some success. New Order became successful, then Happy Mondays came along and everything went crazy. This enormous, strange thing built up. Lots of other independent record labels began opening around the country. It was an amazing period, and the key word was “independent”. Factory Records were people I ended up describing as unpaid social workers, because there was no requirement to make a profit. It was a kind of anarchy. They wanted somewhere they could go, but also somewhere the young people of Manchester could go. In one sense, the timing was just right. In another, it was terrible, because they initially opened the club every night of the week. It was a huge, cavernous space. Tony Wilson said, “Every city should have its cathedral, and this is our cathedral: a place where young people can come and do whatever they want.” He commissioned artists to make installations. There was a hairdressing salon in the basement. They staged fashion shows. It became a multipurpose space.

When I was told it was going to be called the Haçienda, I thought, what the fuck? To me, a hacienda suggested a Mexican adobe house somewhere deep in Mexico. But when it was explained to me that it came from the Situationists, I thought, this is genius.

Ben Kelly at POST PRESS (Matthew Blunderfield)

I have brought proof: Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International. It contains a text called “Formulary for a New Urbanism”. I’m not going to read the whole thing, although it’s interesting for architects. But the final passage ends: “You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.” This was a serious political manifesto by the Situationists. Tony Wilson knew it and mentioned it to Rob Gretton, the manager of Joy Division and New Order. Rob said, “Fucking hell, that’s all right. We’ll have that.” Peter Saville then got hold of it. Being a graphic designer, he added a cedilla beneath the C. If you turn the “çi” upside down, it resembles 51, which was the Factory catalogue number for the project. Every Factory project had a catalogue number. Even the cat at the Haçienda had one.

The Haçienda (1982), Manchester. Image courtesy of Ben Kelly Design

I knew there had to be some sort of sign outside the building, which stood on a dead street in a very run-down part of Manchester. I had a monumental mason hand-carve “FAC 51 Haçienda” into a small rectangular piece of granite, using typography supplied by Peter Saville. The “51” was picked out in red enamel and “Haçienda” in silver leaf. The plaque was set flush with the brickwork beside the entrance. It was tiny. People came from Japan, South America—all over the world—and couldn’t find the place. Some probably never got there because they couldn’t see the sign. But my thinking was that it was all about the journey. I had the numbers 5 and 1 cut into the second set of doors, with glass set into the openings. You first saw the little FAC 51 plaque. Then you entered a small space, went down some steps, passed through the 51 doors and descended into a larger space. From there, you passed through huge plastic curtains, like those you might see in a butcher’s shop, which were there for acoustic reasons, and entered this enormous cavern.

The building that became the Haçienda had previously been a yacht showroom and repair shop. Before that, some form of industry had taken place there, though I don’t know what, and it retained an industrial character. What first made me think about hazard markings were the structural columns supporting the roof. These huge cast-iron columns marched across the dance floor, which was raised one step above the main floor. I thought, shit, people are going to bump into these while they’re cavorting about. I should do something. It also occurred to me that the step itself was a hazard.

The Haçienda (1982), Manchester. Image courtesy of Ben Kelly Design

That led me to the visual language of factories and industrial buildings: pipes painted in different colours to mark what is passing through them, black-and-yellow stripes identifying hazards in the workplace. I took that language and turned it into something else, making it part of the character of the interior. I also realised that I needed to filter people on and off the dance floor. So I had the idea of using roadside bollards at one-metre centres along the edge of the dance floor. We could set proper cat’s eyes into the concrete floor in line with the bollards. I did some research and discovered that the posts were called Allegrini flexible verge posts, and cost £6.50 each. Goddamn bargain. We’ll have as many as we need. A collage of this language began to build up. There was also a balcony that was falling apart when Factory took over the building. We had to construct a new one, so an entire structural scheme was developed. I clad its supports to make them sculptural—to make a painting, or something like one—so the whole interior became a giant piece of sculpture.

The geometry of the journey to the bar took you all the way around the dance floor and past the roadside bollards. At the end was the bar, with a horizontal neon sign reading “The Kim Philby Bar”. I thought, if Tony is going to be difficult and call it the Kim Philby Bar, I’ll be difficult and make the sign impossible to read. It was mounted high up, so you had to crane your neck to see it. I remember being there when two young lads from Manchester, pints in hand, looked up and said, “What the fucking hell’s this? The Kim fucking Philby fucking Bar? What’s that?” The bar on the balcony was called Hicks, a cryptonym used by one of the Cambridge spies, and the cocktail bar in the basement was called the Gay Traitor, after Anthony Blunt, who had been the Queen’s art adviser. So you had all this dodgy political material building up into a narrative, and I loved that. Colour became part of it too. The result was a strange hybrid space that hadn’t really existed before, and it could only have happened because the client was Factory Records and the city was Manchester. I’ve often been asked whether it could have happened in London. No. It couldn’t possibly have happened in London.

Because of the record label, and because New Order and its other bands were becoming more successful, the scene changed constantly. Mike Pickering, who booked the bands and was also a DJ, had an extraordinary eye for emerging talent. He would put people on before they became stars. Madonna gave her first performance in Britain there, filmed live for television. The DJs at the Haçienda discovered music coming out of Chicago and began playing it. Ecstasy appeared and the place went crazy. Nobody bought drinks at the bar; they just bought bottles of water. You would have 2,000 people in a space intended for only 1,100 or 1,200. Drugs arrived, gangs took over the door, violence happened, the police became involved and, eventually, the club closed. But there must be thousands of people who went to the Haçienda and then went out into the world: they met someone they later married, formed a business with someone they met there, or developed projects from encounters that happened in the club. These are amazing places where people have ideas, meet one another and make things happen. The stimulation of the Haçienda made people think. And the Haçienda has been credited with helping to initiate Manchester’s regeneration. And who knows who the next prime minister will be but perhaps somebody associated with what people call “Manchesterism”. So perhaps the Haçienda will be responsible for our next prime minister.

Ben Kelly in trademark orange socks and Virgil Abloh trainers with members of _badweather. (Matthew Blunderfield).

Hélène Binet [far left] speaking at POST PRESS. (Ellis Woodman)

I don’t want to say that there’s not amazing work coming from digital photography, because that would be wrong. Wolfgang Tillmans said the problem of digital versus analogue is not if the light touches a sensor or touches photographic film. It is Photoshop. That’s what makes everything look too much the same. When I started to photograph in the late eighties and nineties I could open a magazine and, without reading, I knew who was the photographer. Now I have difficulty. The signature, the authorship of the photographer is disappearing. I don’t know why we need photographs of architecture that don’t have shadows, don’t have colours, don’t have depth. I remember Casabella photoshopping all the rubbish that I left in front of the house of an architect in Sicily. When I had asked her, the architect, Maria Giuseppina Grazio Canizzo, had said: no, I want to leave that rubbish, this is the area. So I gave Casabella the transparency and they photoshopped it because they said she was messy. But to enter a picture, we need a mistake, a crack, something that says “Let’s go in.” Photographs now tend to remain at a distance. Authorship is possible, but it’s harder to create your own sound or signature, something other than a product that everybody can make just by learning a program.

Hélène Binet was speaking at Looking at Pictures, a conference of architectural photographers held at POST PRESS on Saturday 4th July.

Michael Mack (left) in conversation with Matthew Blunderfield

On Thursday, POST PRESS hosted a live recording of a forthcoming episode of Scaffold, in which Matthew Blunderfield spoke with publisher Michael Mack. Michael’s publishing house MACK is renowned for its photography and fine art books and has only recently ventured into architecture publishing. Matthew asked Michael what he thought MACK was able to offer that other architecture publishers were not?

Michael Mack: It’s a really good question that was answered for me by Adam Caruso. He came to me as a friend of Thomas Demand, who I started working with in 2004, and said, we would really like to do a book or two about his practice. I said, I’m absolutely not interested in the slightest in doing hagiographic, heavily illustrated books about practices, which show the drawings filled in with great pictures. It’s pointless. It’s a coffee table book. And Adam being Adam went away and came back and said: so what could it be? I said, the interesting thing about architecture is where it comes from. And so we then started talking about the early days of Caruso St John, and about exhibitions like James Lingwood’s show at the Hayward Gallery, The Epic and the Everyday [1994], which was formative for us both. And then Adam and the team at Caruso St John came up with this idea of contextualising the history of the practice. So not just showing the work, but showing texts that had been written about shows contemporaneous with the practice’s formation - things that had influenced them. We wanted to show that the architecture wasn’t something that was landed on the earth through the genius of the singular mind of the architect, but rather to show the growth of the ideas, where they came from and how they fed the practice. That I thought was interesting.

Matthew’s full interview with Michael Mack can be heard here.

Caruso St John’s Collected Works is published by MACK

Julian Harrap pictured at POST PRESS with Katharine Nolan (centre) and Alex Butterworth of Studio KA.

Katharine Nolan and Alex Butterworth established their practice Studio KA around a shared concern with reuse and conservation. Their current projects include the remodelling of the nineteenth century board school that forms the home of the Zaha Hadid Foundation where POST PRESS is presently housed. Rounding out a week of talks about Craft and Conservation, Alex and Katharine sat down with the conservation architect Julian Harrap to talk about a career that has included major projects at the Sir John Soane Museum, Pitzhanger Manor and the Royal Academy of Arts. They also discussed the project for which his practice is most renowned, the reconstruction of Berlin’s war-damaged Neues Museum undertaken in partnership with David Chipperfield Architects:

Katharine Nolan: What is so interesting about the Neues Museum is that there was not one dogmatic method - not simply restoration, not simply repair - but a series of strategies. How did your approach to the building begin and develop?

Julian Harrap: The project started in 1995 and finished in 2007. The first thing was to get the bombing records and look at where the bombs dropped and how the RAF approached Museuminsel in the east of Berlin. They were not particularly aiming at the cultural centre - the cathedral, the Schloss, the Altes Museum, the Pergamon and so on - but the wind was in a particular direction, and therefore there was an imprint on the building related to that destruction.

The museum had stood since the 1840s, when Stüler built it, and then came the catastrophe of war. The Russians came through from the east in a very cruel way, with hand-to-hand fighting right across Museuminsel. How do you start with a building that has suffered so terribly?

The Neues Museum in 1990 (Chris John deWitt)

The East German authorities had been very sensible. They looked at the building with care and noticed that where the pavement came up to the building, it used to align, and now it no longer did. That gave rise to the suspicion that there had been settlement. There had. They went to Stüler’s drawings and found a timber grillage with wooden piles underneath. That is a form of construction one would use for many masonry buildings on marshland, as in Holland.

Their concern was that, if they started looking at this fragile and distressed building, the first thing they had to do was make certain that the foundation was secure in a new way. They underpinned the whole building, laying in sectional slabs, drilling through them and through the timber, and putting in new concrete piles. They gave the fragile building a new basis.

Then, rather inadvisedly, they took hard engineering bricks and began stitching the building together, giving the flapping pieces of masonry some stability. It was at that point, around the reunification of Berlin, that we were invited, with many others, to look. Fortunately we secured the commission. We saw decay arising from two assaults: war, and the change brought about by the underpinning.

The Potsdam conservation team had salvaged every piece of fabric of cultural significance. We went out to airfields where fragments of sculpture and little pieces of broken terracotta were laid out in a mess. The basement was full of terrazzo, in boxes labelled, “This came from Gallery 1,” or “We think this came from Gallery 3.” The first objective was to bring order to this chaos of circumstance.

All the material removed from the building was salvaged and catalogued. In many cases we had to secure its future by preventive conservation. We were also able to use the skills of the Potsdam team to identify where things had been taken from. Herr Hensel, who was in charge of the archives, had gone back through Stüler’s drawings and marked where the pieces in Potsdam belonged. That huge mystery was brought to a level of rational intervention. We knew what had been saved and could start looking at the building.

The first thing we did with the building was take out those hard engineering bricks and restitch the flapping masonry with lime mortar and soft second-hand bricks. I went to Berlin and was told, “We do not use second-hand bricks. They do not meet the DIN standard.” I thought, “We have to challenge this.” So I brought the team to Woolwich Arsenal, where we had 4,000 bricks, and said, “Go into that lot and set out twenty bricks each which you think are reusable.” We did that to prove that the circular economy of recycling bricks in London worked.

I told them to take their photographs back to Berlin. Suddenly I received a phone call: “Julian, we have found two million bricks.” There they were, but they had been disregarded. With those bricks, we were able to restitch the building together.

Alex Butterworth: How did your attitude towards combining very new elements of design with conservation develop?

Julian Harrap: We were conscious that we had been given the privilege of taking over this terribly delicate, valuable ruin, which was a memory of the Prussian state, but also needed to memorialise the unification of the two parts of Berlin. This was a building in which one could celebrate what Germany was about.

Alex Butterworth: Was there consensus on that?

Julian Harrap: No. The Easties and the Westies did not always get on. David and I both had to be rather rude to some West Berliners about their patronising attitude to East Berliners, because it was outrageous. But enough anecdotes.

I started with bomb damage, and with utter destruction. Those are the spaces where you can intervene. The north-west wing had survived but had been taken down because stabilising the vast elevation was too difficult. We said that the memory of that wall, which had stood for so long, meant that we had to incorporate its contribution to a neoclassical building, rather than introducing horizontal windows. There was not an opportunity to be radical in that way, because it would have destroyed and undervalued what was adjacent. So we said we would have punched walls in brickwork.

Because this wall had addressed a series of galleries inside, those galleries also had an architecture that needed re-establishing on a grid. Columns occurred opposite piers, and floors had to run through the whole building. The building had been designed as three museums: one at ground floor, one at first floor and one at second floor. On each floor the plan form was a figure of eight. There are two open courtyards in the middle within this massive outer wall, and the whole building is serviced by the Treppenhalle in the centre between the two courtyards.

That staircase had been designed by Stüler not just as a staircase in a building. He had built the art gallery next door, a pedimented Greek Revival hall for paintings, and on its frontage he put a two-storey back-and-forward staircase to reach the raised level above the floodplain of the island. In the Neues Museum he took that landscape form of external staircase and put it inside the building. He was describing this as the landscape stair that enables you to visit the three museums he had built within the one building. It is an inside-outside structure.

We did have a row about whether we should put a new staircase in, but that was between friends.

The original Stüller stair.

Katharine Nolan: The stair in the end reinstates the form and figure of the original stair, while the walls of the room are the brickwork. It is really the form that is restored.

Julian Harrap: It is a shell.

Katharine Nolan: How long did it take you to get to that?

Julian Harrap: The analysis of the building showed us that each museum had a vestibule or front door, and therefore the staircase’s task was to visit each of those front doors. There were many drawings of a circular stair, of which there are a number of possible forms. But the problem is that one then starts making a series of flights and landings, and the geometry of getting to where you want to get simply did not work. It was a process that had to be done.

I feel that the congruity we were pushed towards by the whole team was that if Stüler had intended the stair to be of that form, we were free to interpret the material. The Potsdam team had already cast in zinc a new balustrade they were going to put on the Beaux-Arts reconstruction of the staircase, which they saw as their duty. We said no: this staircase has to be of its day, while recognising the previous arrangement, so that it brings you to the entrances of these three museums.

The great shafts of light that came in from east and west lit the space beautifully. We rebuilt the colonnade at first-floor level. The columns were all in the courtyard, and rebuilding it reintroduced the circularity of the plan at the level above.

The stair introduced by the DCA/JHA team.

Alex Butterworth: That takes us to authorship. Part of this work is obviously authored by you, but the original architect also has significant authorship over the new scheme, and David Chipperfield Architects were working alongside you. Is it important to you that the building shows some of your authorship?

Julian Harrap: I am very antagonistic to authorship. Authorship is the outcome, in that instance, of twenty people sitting for two years around a table, meeting every month, to write three books setting out the approach to the project.

The first book was history: what have we got? The second was strategies and policies: what do we believe the modern German state should adopt, at a European and world level, as the philosophy within which we should operate? Should we expunge the Russian damage, the bullet marks in the stone? I said no. We do not expunge it, but we half-fill the ricochet marks so that we suppress their importance and allow the repaired stonework to be Stüler’s. But when you go closer, it is Stüler assaulted by the Russians.

The third component was getting our language together. In English and German we defined what the words meant. I can quote one. Reversibility: the concept of work to a building, part of a building or artefact being carried out in such a way that it can be reversed at some future time without significant damage having been done.

Then there is restoration. Restoration is a Beaux-Arts expression. We call it repair, coming from William Morris and the SPAB. But I will try restoration, because it is quite a tongue-twister: alteration of a building, part of a building or artefact which has decayed, been lost or damaged, or is thought to have been inappropriately repaired or altered in the past, the objective of which is to make it conform again to its design or appearance at a previous date.

Restoration applies a significantly different approach to repair. Restoration is inventive. That idea that restoration leads you into invention is one of the reasons why the SPAB rejected it as a falsehood.

That is the temptation with Notre-Dame: “We need a new roof and we have the Napoleonic forests, so let us go and fell a thousand oak trees and reproduce what was burnt in the fire.” They did not reproduce what was burnt in the fire. They tried as closely as possible to recreate what had been built originally before Viollet-le-Duc’s revisions.

That was the temptation that the Potsdam team, from East Berlin, were very respectfully tempted by. But the agreement I have just read from allowed us to move to a point where, as far as possible, we avoided recreation. There was one instance where I offered it, and because it had all been written down, they said, “No, Julian, you cannot do that. You are breaking the rules.” Sometimes one likes to break the rules, but there we are.

Polly brought her parasol to POST PRESS

At the end of a week of unprecedentedly hot temperatures, James Pockson and Neal Shasore chaired the second of their POST PRESS sessions interrogating the dogmas and clichés of conservation practice. One particularly timely contribution came from Polly Turton, the head of Climate Action and Public Health at Shade the UK, who argued that our built environment needs urgent adaptation if it is to retain resilience:

Earlier this week, I was at an event about the 1976 heatwave. The irony was not lost on me. It was framed as a huge moment in history: not quite a celebration, because that would be the wrong word, but an acknowledgement of a moment when the country became extremely hot. It was almost as hot as it has been this week, but it lasted longer, and apparently it changed British life and culture. Scientists at the event were explaining that, if the temperatures of 1976 happened now, in 2026, the impact would be much worse.

At the same time, as we were listening to these scientists saying that this means we have to act, Keir Starmer handed in his resignation. I was sitting there thinking: hang on, no one is running the country. We were talking about a historic heatwave and a theoretical future in which heatwaves become more common — and then the red alerts were issued: an extreme heat alert and a heat-health alert.

We need more shade. Whether it is a beautiful canopy projecting from a high-street façade above produce, a nail bar or a hipster coffee shop, that kind of shade would make a huge difference to businesses and to their energy bills. Some local authorities are receptive to that. On Upper Street, not far from here, there is encouragement for that sort of look and feel. If you look at historic photographs, Upper Street and Essex Road once had lots of awnings. Now it is patchy, like a row of broken teeth: there used to be a full set, and now there are bits missing.

But shade is not only about things we attach to buildings. It is also about the public realm, about trees, and about keeping trees green through water.

I took some thermal-imaging photographs this week. On a 35-degree day, a piece of grass under a mature tree on a typical Hackney housing estate — probably a 1930s estate — registered at about 26 degrees. That is almost a ten-degree difference. I did the same experiment on a piece of pavement. It wasn’t even the worst black asphalt; it was dark grey paving. That registered at 56 degrees. That is just surface temperature. I didn’t even have a thermometer to measure what it would feel like to a person standing there.

There is another metric called the Universal Thermal Climate Index, which is essentially a “feels like” temperature. It combines surface temperature, air temperature, humidity and wind flow to describe what a person actually experiences in a space. Thinking about shade means thinking about all of these things together.

Andu Masebo (left) and James Woodcock (Ellis Woodman)

The Matthew Bonye Research Fellow at the Architecture Foundation, James Woodcock, is developing a book of interviews with fabricators, builders and craftspeople. As part of that project, he led a conversation at POST PRESS with two members of the team that had realised the recently opened V&A East in Stratford, East London. Andu Masebo spoke about the highly crafted timber bench that he designed and delivered within the permanent galleries and discussed the importance of making to his creative practice:

I studied ceramics at Central Saint Martins, and after that I started working in galleries installing artworks. Because I was around tools, I moved into building crates, doing fabrication and constructing gallery spaces. At first, fabrication was just a way of staying in London. When I finished my BA, I wanted to be around the people who excited me, to go to parties, to be in the city, and I needed a way to earn money.

Ten years later, I found myself working in a fabrication workshop in Kent. I was doing interesting projects, but I was underpaid, overworked, and probably shortening my life by inhaling chemicals and dust. I had this feeling that if you go to work covered in plaster, people look at you strangely on the train. I reached a point where I thought, “I’m done with making stuff.”

So I went to the RCA to study Design Products as a way of getting away from it. I wanted to put on a white shirt, save towards a pension, and become a serious professional in the world. But I made terrible work the whole time I was there. Looking back, I realised I had spent ten years working as a fabricator, and I had been able to do that because I have a naturally handy way of thinking. So much of how I understand the world is through doing. It is how I problem-solve.

By trying to leave that behind, I was cutting off a large part of my brain. I think we all have a relationship to how we think, and if we try to become something other than what we are, we are not going to be our fullest selves.

I also realised that a lot of the work I was making at the RCA was derivative. I would look at something by FormaFantasma and think, “I’ll make a video,” or “I’ll make a kiosk.” Their work at that time felt like the be-all and end-all of product design to me. But I was only seeing the surface of it. You can never really understand all the conversations, pain, reasoning, compromises and things that did not happen behind a piece of work. What you encounter is the veneer. I was looking at other people’s veneers and recycling them into something that was empty inside.

It was only by going back to making, in a way that I genuinely owned, that I found my voice. I found a way of putting something into the world that felt authentic. There are still difficult points — the V&A project certainly wasn’t easy sailing — but I feel I have found a way of being myself in my practice. The answers are somehow inside the process.

A lot of how I am as a designer comes from that period when I didn’t like what I was doing in the world. I felt I was making luxury goods for a world that didn’t care about the conditions in which those things came into being.

A lot of my work now is about reconnecting the process of making things with how they are felt in the world. That can move from the maker to the person who lives with or buys the object, or it can move in the other direction. It might be about teaching someone how to make something — not just so they can get it more cheaply because they made it themselves, but so they understand how something is made, and therefore know better and buy better. In that sense there is something Enzo Mari-esque about it.

There are many ways to reconnect people with the magic of making and with how things come to exist in the world. A big part of my practice has become about reaching out and bringing other voices into the work — voices that would not normally feel comfortable being there, or that might be underrepresented. It is about getting more voices into the room.

In 1996 Mark Brearley (seated far left with Michael Marriott) established the urban strategy consultancy East. The firm’s early work included the re-landscaping of Borough High Street - a project that developed from the Architecture Foundation’s Future Southwark initiative. He worked for the Mayor of London from 2001; first with Richard Rogers and the Architecture and Urbanism Unit, and then with Design for London where he led the team for the five years until 2013. The role of industry in London has been a longstanding preoccupation, which he has explored first in his capacity as an urbanist and more recently as the director of Kaymet, an aluminium tray manufacturer which operates from the Old Kent Road. Rosa Nussbaum and Jos Myles Geczy of RAFT spoke to Mark at the launch of Jigs, a pop-up exhibition hosted at POST PRESS which featured the work of makers from Blackhorse Studios and other open-access workshops, presented alongside the jigs and tooling that had enabled their production.

I have spent most of my career working in what we used to describe as urbanism: thinking about cities generally, but especially London. Yet I now find myself running a manufacturing business. The designer in me enjoys aspects of it enormously. Kaymet’s products are these classics that emerged from the factory without designers, and there is something really fascinating about that kind of simple vernacular design. But there is also something a little polemical about my having ended up doing this. It relates directly to my interest in the city. There I am in this factory, but I am always thinking about whether this connects to a bigger conversation about London. And I think it does.

Open-access workshops have emerged for many reasons. One of them, certainly, is the experience of eviction. We talked to the people who set up BLOQS, the large open-access workshop in Edmonton, and their motivation came very directly from their own experience of being evicted again and again. The disruption of that is painful for anyone, but especially where there is a community of people sharing spaces, working over the road from one another, helping one another, learning from one another, sharing equipment. When that gets smashed up and everyone has to start again, it is particularly damaging.

The positives of open-access workshops are many but I think the phenomenon has hit a ceiling. They are not proliferating any more. They are a bit like city farms in the 1970s, when there was a sense that the whole city might become a farm, and then it stabilised. Breweries are similar. Everyone was opening a brewery, and then suddenly we had reached peak brewery. I think we have also reached peak open-access workshop, at least for the moment.

London obviously had much more manufacturing once upon a time, but manufacturing remains significant in the city. Nobody seems to know the exact numbers, but there are perhaps four or five thousand businesses, and somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 jobs. That may be modest in the context of London as a whole, but it is still a lot of people and a lot of activity. It is not simply a residual heritage activity in decline. It still has a major role in the city.

The bigger picture is that London has a problem of welcome. Industry — and, within that, making and manufacturing — is hit particularly hard because its accommodation requirements are quite specific. It needs large spaces, tough spaces, goods access and so on. It is also relatively low down the value hierarchy and it has an image problem. As a result, it has been smashed and smashed for decades.

The scale of the problem is measured in hundreds of hectares but it is not only a question of quantity; it is also a question of geography. The city does not simply lack the right amount of industrial space. It lacks the right kinds of settings, in the right places, at the right scales.

Kaymet trays

London has a problem welcoming housing — that is the big one — but it also has a glaring problem in relation to many non-residential uses. At a crude spatial level, it does not feel welcoming enough. It cannot provide the accommodation, in quantity, type or geography.

If we were to have a conversation about what kind of city we want, I suspect most of us would agree that it should contain different scales and different geographies. That might mean having workshops, small depots and similar activities on every high street. That is how it used to be, but it is also a good vision for the future: at the filigree level, this possibility is everywhere. If you want to start mending bikes or cars, or doing some other classic entry-level form of repair or industrial activity, where do you do it? That is the underlying urban question.

Much of my work in local authorities was an attempt to grapple with that question, though perhaps the honest analysis is that I spent a lot of time failing at it. I was part of, and later ran, what I used to call a troublemaking team. In more contemporary language you might call it a disruptor team. We pushed initiatives, many of them positive, but we were also constantly problematising things, saying: there is a problem here. One of those problems was industry. The planners making the London Plan, and people in the boroughs, were looking at industry statistics and saying, “We can’t afford to lose more than this much industrial land each year.” And we were asking: what are you measuring that against? Where is the map? They would say, “What map?” So we became the people asking why nobody had gone out and found out what was actually there — in Park Royal, for example. We were saying: come on, you need to understand this better.

Mark Brearley co-edited Made in London: From Workshops to Factories (2022)

I have spent a lot of energy over the years trying to get that deeper understanding. And that is what accidentally led me to Kaymet. As a subset of all that work, I set myself a personal challenge: I thought, I will find out what manufacturing there is in London, because the place where I work does not know, and that seems really strange. Not only did they not have maps of industry — they do now, but they did not then — but when I probed further and asked what manufacturing existed in London, the answer was: we do not know. Nobody knows.

So I ended up finding out for myself. That led to a book about manufacturing in London. And in the process of visiting places, I came across this business, which then landed in my lap like a hot coal.

Jigs, an exhibition of the work of makers from Blackhorse Studios and other open-access workshops, curated by RAFT.

Dr Kent Rawlinson at POST PRESS (Ellis Woodman)

The second week of POST PRESS included two conversations led by James Pockson (IDK) and Neal Shasore (London School of Building) which set out to interrogate the dogmas and clichés of contemporary conservation practice. The contributors included the enviably T-shirted Dr Kent Rawlinson who had spent the previous week in the High Court defending the National Trust’s plans for the conservation of Clandon Park, a Palladian house in Surrey that was devastated by fire in 2015. This project, for which Kent is acting as creative director with Allies and Morrison serving as architects, controversially declines to attempt a facsimile of the interior’s lost ornamental plasterwork. In the course of the evening, Kent touched on the curatorial implications of that choice:

Who are houses like Clandon monuments to? Traditionally, Clandon has been understood as a monument to the Onslow family, who built it, or to Giacomo Leoni, the important early eighteenth-century architect who designed it. Of course, Leoni did not literally build it at all, but the house is nevertheless very much claimed as his. That was apparent in the court case last week, where there was repeated emphasis on the importance of “the Leoni house” and, in particular, “the Leoni roof”.

But a house like Clandon can be a monument in many other ways. One of the things the fire did was to strip away almost all the interiors. What was revealed was essentially a brick-built structure: extraordinary walls, about a metre thick, through which you can read the hierarchy of the house and the differences between its spaces. Above all, you encounter thousands and thousands of bricks. Even in a world where brick is everywhere, that remains remarkable.

Every one of those bricks was made very locally to Clandon. That was partly for simple economic reasons: a brick is heavy, a pallet of bricks is very heavy, and the roughly 3.2 million bricks in the house are heavier still. They were made locally by agricultural labourers, often in the off-season, digging up clay, preparing it, and forming the bricks. These were subsistence-level workers in early eighteenth-century society, often whole families, including women and children.

And making a brick is hard. I have tried it. You have to throw the clay into a mould, turn it out, and stack it. It is skilled, physically demanding work. So when we talk about embodied histories, that is not an abstract idea. Every single one of those bricks is handmade. Each one embodies the lives and labour of people for whom we may have no other record at all. The record of their lives is there in the fabric of the building.

That is why it is so frustrating when opponents of our approach speak dismissively of the “fire-damaged walls” at Clandon, as if they are merely bleak or empty. They suggest that, if you want to tell that story, you can do so in a panel or a guided tour, for people who happen to be interested in that sort of thing. What is missing is any recognition that an encounter with the building itself can be powerful and meaningful in precisely that way.

This is one of the things that motivates us. And to make it meaningful, rather than just an idea, one of the audience communities we are working with over the next four or five years, before the house opens, is tradespeople and craft workers. I do not mean only heritage craft specialists, although we have great relationships with them and value their expertise enormously. I mean bricklayers, masons, electricians: the people whose work the house is, in a very real sense, a monument to. It is a monument to their labour in the past.

That ought not to be controversial, but it is. Part of the difficulty lies in the way heritage is understood in this country, and particularly the way country houses dominate that understanding.

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Convened by David McEwan of Unit 38, the second night of POST PRESS was devoted to the history and legacy of the Community Technical Aid Centre movement which emerged in the UK in the late 1970s. David had invited contributors from present day organisations that he saw as inheritors of the spirit of the CTACs, among whom was Aska Welford of House of Annetta. Here, Aska describes this unique facility - a social centre and space for learning and action around spatial justice, based in a building from 1705, just off Brick Lane in East London:

The neighbourhood has a very special legacy, stretching over centuries as a place where new migrants have made home in the UK: from the French Huguenots, to the Irish, to Eastern European Jewish communities, to the Bangladeshi community in the twentieth century.

With those communities came many different social movements: early trade union organising, squatting, anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations on the street. It was in that context of slum clearance and squatting, and of saving the building in the late 1970s, that Annetta Pedretti came to take ownership of the house.

Annetta Pedretti (House of Annetta)

Annetta was part of an Architectural Association legacy. Brian Anson, one of the founders of the Architects’ Revolutionary Council at the AA, was part of that world, and Annetta herself had studied at the AA. We have some of her student projects in our archive. One of them is an amazing board game with cards labelled “Don’t Crush”. It sets out the disputes and tactics that different parties might use when dealing with the pressures of urban development around them. Her student work gives a glimpse into the world of late-1970s London.

Similarly, one of her friends, another AA graduate called Kay Jordan, had come to live in Spitalfields in the 1970s as a student. There was a whole practice of studios taking root in different communities: working directly with them, and redistributing resources in a hands-on way. That is how Kay Jordan first came to Spitalfields, and I will come back to her later.

Annetta definitely was not a community architect. She did not fully qualify. I have not either. She was also very committed to the house as a project that lasted for decades. One of her neighbours joked that he would see Annetta repairing one brick a year on the façade. She did not offer architectural services in a conventional way, but she was a very active campaigner. She was deeply committed to local anti-demolition campaigns and to opposing Crossrail, which would have driven destructive tunnels through the area.

House of Annetta (second right) on Princelet Street (Ellis Woodman)

Annetta passed away in 2018. When she died, her family, in recognition of her politics and her relationship to space, gave the building and its contents to a Swiss foundation, Stiftung Edith Maryon. The foundation’s mission is centred on the way the extortionate value of land makes social good impossible. I think that is another piece of the puzzle in terms of the disappearance of community technical aid, and the changing landscape we are in now: the relationship to land ownership.

Over the past six years, each summer, we have been figuring out what this building can be as a resource in this particular neighbourhood, under this very specific ownership condition. The foundation will never sell. We have been supported for five years by people across its network of around 150 other projects, helping us to get something started.

The long-term plan is to use the repair and refurbishment of the building as a way to learn skills. How do we retrofit? How do we do carpentry, plastering, plumbing and rewiring? The aim is not only to repair this one very specific, very dilapidated building, but also for cohorts of learners to take those skills into other community spaces: perhaps across East London, perhaps further afield.

We have set up one stage of that this year through a sibling organisation called Living Constructions. It is based on one of Annetta’s principles: living books. As well as being a builder and architectural designer, she was an artist and publisher, and she had this idea of living books as something based on process, dialogue and response. We are trying to embody that in our ways of building.

At the moment, we are on site building what I think will be London’s first community-owned, wheelchair-accessible LGBTQ+ pub and performance space. We are working with an amazing campaign group called Friends of the Joiners Arms. They have been going for 11 years, since the closure of their pub, the Joiners Arms, on Hackney Road.

We run learning sessions every Wednesday, so people can drop in and learn how to plaster with us, or do something else. Fingers crossed, the space will open in just a few weeks, in the middle of summer, hopefully around Trans Pride.

The long-term ambition is that Living Constructions becomes an organisational vehicle that can raise money, hold insurance and build experience in order to do more of this construction work: both at House of Annetta and in support of other community projects. We have a few things lined up that we hope we can make happen.

One of the things we have learned from working with Friends of the Joiners Arms is that, yes, we bring technical knowledge about building things, submitting plans for building regulations, and interfacing with the built environment. But we also lend our expertise in other ways: negotiating with landlords, writing difficult letters, working on funding applications, and leveraging our networks. So much of that is part of our role too. I feel that this is the legacy of the technical aid centre. It is not just: here is a drawing. It is about being in relationship, and working towards a shared goal with whatever resources you have to hand.

I do not want to forget Kay Jordan. She is still a bit of a mystery to me, and I am trying to learn more about her. Last summer we got a knock on the door, and that is one of the great things about having a physical space. You are interrupted all the time. A woman arrived; we found out her name was Flora. She was in tears. She had worked with Annetta and Annetta’s friend Kay in the 1990s.

Kay was a member of the RIBA Community Design Group and was quite critical of it. She had trained as an architect at the AA and worked for decades, until her death in the mid-2010s, as a community architect. But instead of setting up a technical aid centre, she set up organisations. Through those organisations, she was able to establish and protect thousands of square metres of commercial, office and workspace around Brick Lane and Banglatown from gentrification and rising land values.

I really want to know more about Kay Jordan. I found out that the nursery I went to was designed by her — not only its spatial design, though I remember interacting with some of the cupboards, but also the way the nursery was nested within a migrant women’s centre. It offered childcare, but also English lessons and workshops in garment manufacturing.

That network of things feels really utopian. It suggests what technical aid centres could be, and what kinds of projects become possible when communities are empowered not only through access to experts, but also through security over land and access to money.

The final thing I wanted to mention about Friends of the Joiners Arms, because they are really special, is that they managed to raise £200,000. That is not enough to buy a building, but it is enough to pay for construction work and design services. I think that is another hinge point. If we want more technical aid to happen, we need to figure out the money problem.

The evening included a presentation of Community Action magazine and other material relating to the Community Technical Aid Centre movement. (Ellis Woodman)

Sir Stuart Lipton at POST PRESS (Matthew Blunderfield)

POST PRESS kicked off last Wednesday with Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford of General Office interviewing the 83-year old titan of the London property wold, Sir Stuart Lipton. Richard and Emma had produced a map for the occasion detailing the extraordinary extent of Sir Stuart’s influence on the development of London.

Map of Sir Stuart Lipton’s projects in central London by General Office

Speaking to an audience that included such former collaborators as Eric Parry, Alan Stanton and Paul Williams, Sir Stuart recalled his early career as an estate agent, the crucial role that Richard Rogers and Peter Foggo had played in his architectural education, his battles with the then Prince of Wales over the redevelopment of Paternoster Square and his abiding concern with the creation of public space. He spoke too about his hopes for London’s future and, in particular, the imminent pedestrianisation of Oxford Street. Here, we share some of his thoughts about the project’s potential, edited for clarity:

Don’t put buses in the adjoining streets. Most of the buses are empty. Why don’t we put driverless buses in Oxford Street? They’re very small, like a big car. If you walk in front of them, they stop dead. So there’s not a safety problem: people could walk up and down. That would be an easy move: much more civilised and wouldn’t take much space.

Secondly - forgive the vulgarity - if you want to pee in Oxford Street, do you know where to go? I’ve got a secret map. John Lewis is quite good. Selfridges is not bad. But in the alleys off Oxford Street, mothers take their children to pee. So I’d start with where are the toilets going?

Where’s the public space going? I’d destroy some terraces. Opposite Selfridges is a Victorian terrace of no merit. Tear it down and build an elegant tower, which gives you an open space. I’d start looking for open spaces so the street returned to its civic dream. I’d like to think of a space where there was a concert. I’ve been trying to tease the City that when the Barbican closes for its refurbishment, could the LSO perform at the Bank Junction in Guildhall Yard? They’d be amazing, and I’m sure corporates would pay. So where in Oxford Street would the music be?

And where could you get a coffee for a pound? Not £4.50. Okay, you’d have to have a pass as a resident, but, in one of my ventures, the Bernie Grant Centre in Tottenham, you can get a cappuccino for a pound. Personally, I’m not on the drug - happy with a straight espresso from a capsule for 30p - but the social side of it is important. Where is it that we can talk to each other?

And I’m sure Oxford `Street could have some trees: big trees, not 3-metre whips, which is standard Westminster product, but maybe 10-metre trees.

Where’s an art gallery? Where are there other civic activities? What could be fun? I had a very pleasurable trip to Japan a few weeks ago, where many of these values are still retained. I went to two airports and there were children’s play areas in the lounges. You go to a shop in Oxford Street, wouldn’t it be great to have a crèche? It’d be great to have an area where kids were looked after properly.

Richard Hall, Emma Rutherford and Sir Stuart Lipton (Matthew Blunderfield)