University of Plymouth
Escaping The Fountainhead
Just seen William Greaves' movie "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One". Outright masterpiece.
Escaping The Fountainhead
The article when I found my voice. Stories, the everyday and a sprinkling of theory.
Scarcity Scares. Video here.
My first published work. Oh, what a clever young chappy I was. Sanctimonious posturing.
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.
On the dangers and vanities of form. Written when I was wading through my philosophy degree and it shows.
Architecture Depends
A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.
My last (ever?) building as an architect, designed with Sarah Wigglesworth. Made of straw and stuff. Best known for being on Grand Designs, the video of which is online. Sarah’s wonderful book on the project views it from all sides. Winner of the RIBA Sustainability Award, a Civic Trust Award and some others. Lots and lots of reviews of the project, including the Observer, and, and, ... We live in it and are happy.
Funny how ideas formed so long ago still come up. But rather gauche nonetheless.
My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
Spatial Ethics. A lecture that tried to marry work on spatial agency with Arna Mathiesen's brilliant analysis of scarcity in Reykjavik.
Architecture Depends. Flight was delayed. I was an hour late, but it was a Friday evening and they had got out the wine. A great gig.
Texts for the catalogue to the British Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. On ideas of scale and stories in cities.
On the basis of a pitch written on an iPhone on the top of a mountain in Ethiopia, I was invited to curate the UK Pavilion at the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. The eventual pavilion was curated, designed and produced by students and staff from Central Saint Martins, and took the theme of Liquid Boundaries - arguing the need to find ways through the hardening of space as it is being increasingly controlled, regulated and divided. The pavilion presented four films, each 129 seconds long (the average time someone spends in a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale), which interpreted briefs provided by four UK architects and spatial agents. All in their own way open up ways in which boundaries might be negotiated with, and in so doing a more democratic form of space emerges. More information, including a downloadable pamphlet and 'user manual', can be found on the Liquid Boundaries website.
Chosen in open competition to curate the British Pavilion, I put together the best creative minds in Sheffield to present an echo of this wonderful city (the link takes you to my initial application, and I have to say the room data sheets are not bad). The team included: Ian Anderson, Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning, Encounters, Martyn Ware, and Jim Prevett. The show attempted to explain how a city is great beyond its buildings: it did not have much architecture in, which did not go down well with architects, especially those in London, who were doubly annoyed that a provincial academic was doing the show. But beyond the Clerkenwell goldfish bowl (with Ellis Woodman in particularly splenetic form, fortunately now behind a paywall), the exhibition was better received (i.e in Die Presse, Der Standard, Financial Times, The Architects Newspaper, The Times, The Yorkshire Post, and of course the Sheffield Telegraph )