 Good evening everyone and I know I first wanted to both thank and congratulate the authors of the beautiful sign on the facade of Avery which makes us look really good and engaged and I'm sure we have many outside who will trickle in into the lecture. So tonight we're really excited to welcome VPPR in the spirit of the schools continuing to support emerging practices and and also returning alumni and and also three incredible women working together so that's our contribution to a new era. So I welcome tonight Tatiana van Prusen who's in a mark from 2007, Catherine Pease and Jessica Reynolds and even though it's a young practice it's fair to say that VPPR has developed a few striking characteristics. On the one hand they offer very bold designs and really create an architecture that is sort of has a kind of very honest clear sort of boldness to it but their work also has an intelligence in how it deals with the complexity of context and reinterprets it. The firm has designed buildings that always try to kind of engage that context and find opportunities within its constraints and always bring a level of kind of both expertise but also playfulness in the way in particular their buildings and projects negotiate the private and the kind of public spheres. I would also say that this kind of striking quality is not just in their buildings but also visible through their drawings with the real attention to representation and drawings that speak in a kind of very complex and beautiful way about the discipline. They both practice in the UK and abroad and across a number of scales from master plans to private houses and from cultural to commercial. And in particular I really always have found that they are trying to kind of reinvent the everyday and reinvent building types to find new ways of being. I think for us it's very exciting to see the kind of experimentation they have brought to housing particularly in facing the challenge of building highly constrained sites and within London's very dense fabric. And even as they engage questions of housing always trying to find ways to weave sort of art and architecture not as this kind of separate from but rather as a way to find creative solutions that engage a sense of community and that engage communities no matter how large or small the projects are. Tatiana Van Prusen, Catherine Pease and Jessica Reynolds met at Cambridge University and proceeded respectively to Columbia GESAP for Tatiana, the AA for Catherine and Princeton for their graduate studies. Each of them has worked in New York before returning to London at the height of the recession to start their firm. It is always a good idea by the way to start at the height of a recession because you can only go up from there. It's kind of like how we are right now in general. They have built work in London, Switzerland, Cardiff and I hope that this invitation and they're kind of hanging out in New York will start to reconnect them with this context. And I just wanted to mention key projects. The first one is Outs Yard, in which the firm worked as developers and architects and the two homes are really interesting and are inside the centre of a block of rural houses and oriented towards the central courtyard to minimize the impact on the surrounding block. So again really thinking in a very interesting way about context and that won a number of awards such as the Year Blue Ribbon Awards in 2014, the Ideal Housing Architect and the Reba London Award in 2014 and it was finalist as part of Reba Stephen Lawrence Award in 2014 as well. And the second one is a beautiful project called The Vaulted House which reinvent not only context but actually preservation and you know we're certainly very sort of interested in that here at the school we're thinking how we can engage our kind of post-industrial fabric and that again won a number of awards such as the Reba London Award of 2015 and London Emerging Practice Award also of 2015. So please join me in welcoming VPPR. The response will be given by our very own Adam Frampton. So stick around. Thank you so much Dean Andrews for having us and all of you for coming. There's a lot going on in the city at the moment so really appreciate your support here tonight. We were very flattered to be invited and it's particularly special for me and it's alumni to be standing on the other side of the podium. As Dean Andrews described we met as undergrads and started just the three of us in the financial recession around Catherine's kitchen table in London. When our 12 people in the office in East London we happen to be predominantly women in the office but it's not by design. There are a couple of men now in fact working for us and it's a really great team and I really wanted to thank our team. It's very collaborative. There's a great atmosphere in the office and you know really kind of great buzz and they really contribute to all of the projects that we have. So when we move back there was this sort of identity crisis of coming from the States having had this incredible formal freedom at Columbia. It was really just at the end of the big formal era with Greg Lynn and Jeff Kipnis and this was an image from Hanan De O'Lonzo's studio. He's doing these kind of crazy animals out of Maya objects and then coming back to London and this is the kind of context, the kind of Victorian terrace house and how on earth do you begin to bring anything like that back into the city. The terrace house actually became a key research exercise for us and we were invited by the RABA recently to participate in an exhibition for the House of Tomorrow and we were asked to look at the terrace house in particular and one of the kind of key defining aspects of terrace house is the party wall. So it's a wall, a structural wall that's shared between the two houses to either side and we began to speculate that what if actually instead of sharing a wall you began to share space in the context of this incredible tightness in London now, this kind of lack of space really, lack of space for people. If you could share the house to either side and you kind of could condense all of the private functions into the wall then you could effectively have a house that was twice as wide but you would be sharing the space to either side with your neighbour and also this sort of feeling that in Britain and I think possibly in America that the communal spaces are viewed slightly with suspicion and that really if you could just share with one other person that maybe that would be palatable for British. I like the private space. So the other thing that interested us about the terrace house was the idea of it as a kind of cell in a grid. It's just a very simple grid and in a way the terrace house is it's hard to reinvent because it's such a flexible typology but we began to think that actually if you could take the idea of wallpaper which itself is a grid really repeated that allows you to have kind of continuous, sinuous curves across a large area that you could almost use that to produce the plan of the terrace house. So we took this pattern by Boise and there was for a notional new development in Cumbria where which is his birthplace and we used that pattern as an underlying pattern to generate the plan. So you can see the blue areas that all the private functions in the house so they've been kind of squeezed into the wall. They do conform to the London space standards and there are three bedrooms, a sitting room, kitchen and so forth and then you have these spaces to either side that are the shared spaces and the geometry does allow those spaces to feel very kind of open rather than being kind of divided which I think would be the case if it was an orthogonal geometry. So we're very interested in these kind of gradients between public and private spaces and the kind of addition of these plans together produces a kind of larger pattern that could be applied to a whole new town which has even still the feel of some of the London Terrace houses with their rounded bay windows and the kind of repetition and it could be the pattern could itself become landscape, way to generate landscape patterns, public buildings, street furniture and this is a kind of view in the interior of the space where you have kind of balconies and windows overlooking and you could use the space for instance to as a shared play area for children or shared office space and it's really up to the two neighbours on either side to program that space. So we have had opportunities to test these explorations of typologies in London and these are these are the sites in that we're working on some of them are built some of them are in process of being built and they're scattered all over the city but the one thing that they really have in common is that they are all infill sites so they all are subject to very similar constraints. They tend to be surrounded by back gardens or they're squeezed into kind of little pockets of left over former industrial spaces. They're often very strange shapes and they're overlooked on all sides. So we've kind of almost brought these together as a series of experimentations with different forms that the these infill projects could take and this is just a grid of the projects that we're some of the projects that we're working on and there actually are others on this grid. There are sort of five principles of the infill house which I think are useful in kind of the structure of this talk. The fifth facade is this idea about the roof. The perimeter walls often you can't have any windows because they would be overlooking into someone's garden or into the back of someone's house. So you really left with one primary facade which is the roof and all the light has to come down through the roof but also it's this facade that's seen because the rest of the house is tucked away in this kind of courtyard and so how that facade is expressed becomes a kind of new kind of creative experiment and you'll see in some of the projects that comes really well. A lot of the design work is concentrated so that that idea of the fifth facade creates this inverted section where you know often in houses the bedrooms are upstairs the living space is downstairs by the garden and we end up kind of usually flipping that relationship so we have all of the living spaces and the communal spaces upstairs near the light. Bedrooms go down below and light is brought to those bedrooms through interior courtyards with the roof light but also outdoor rooms which act as outdoor courtyards completely surrounded by the house itself and they often function really as living rooms as well for the few very few weeks of the year that we have nice weather in London and and then the other thing is that the sites because they feel so constrained often the building is sunk. There's a danger that they could feel very constricted and so we use these kind of classical omphalod ideas of lining up all the doors and the windows in order to create maximum vistas through the site to really try to extend the space the feeling of space in the site. This is a vaulted house that Amar mentioned earlier and you can see it's surrounded completely by gardens and the entrance is here on the street and in fact it just looks like a garage door it's completely unannounced you have no idea this was there and the only way you can see it are from the upper floors in the surrounding buildings at the back windows. You come through through this underpass and there's a little courtyard and then you enter the house on the corner and this is the house from the block at the back. The perimeter walls are all existing walls it was a taxi garage previously and we've just simply spanned the structure off those existing walls so the whole roof that floats up here is just structurally spanning off those existing brick walls and it forms this kind of checkerboard harlequin pattern that's visible from the buildings around and here you can see this principle of having the living spaces upstairs near to this vaults that bring light down into the living space and then the bedrooms and bathrooms on this floor and then these double height spaces the entrance hall playroom garden and a courtyard back here and the vaults are positioned with a roof light above over different zones in this open plan communal space so there's almost a sort of essentially a vault above every table every significant table so there's a sitting room and the vault is over the coffee table and there's the kitchen island and the dining room and this courtyard here has a little balcony and these doors slide completely back into the wall so that this can almost become like an external like a like a lodgier in the in the summer and there's a sort of relationship between the kitchen and the playroom visual relationship so there's a lot of thoughts about how the how the house is used in a domestic environment in the plan so here you see the bedrooms downstairs four bedrooms three bathrooms utilities and and here the playroom lot of storage and the roof the roof patterns here this is the the kind of entrance section you come in you go up onto the upper floor and down to the lower floors the courtyards and interior double height spaces and so the inside the vault is very crisply detailed it's not really doesn't express the structure structure is actually enormous is enormous beam in here which is completely concealed by the finishes and this so we were trying to really create a feeling of a lightweight insertion into the existing building and the language of this vault then also come through into the details other details in the house so it becomes the fireplace becomes here a window which is a translucent glass window and also onto the floor which has a sort of reflected ceiling plan of the vault so I have this kind of crisscross very simple materials we never seem to have enough left in the budget to do complicated materials and then this is the roof so you can see it's just again very simple materials in two tones of a single ply membrane and that just meets very crisply on the edges and this again was with it was very complicated to hide all of the structure so you didn't have any structure popping up either and the vault again appearing in the door the entrance door in the brickwork and that's at night as this is Otsiad this was actually I did this before the vaulted house it's two houses around the central courtyard and they each have a garden and it's accessed down this really long really narrow passageway so that was that was another challenge was how you we had to dig this house out and how we got the spoil up and down here was was a real challenge for the contractors the neighbors were very important to the resolution of this project and we held an exhibition when the house when the site was still derelict it was this is timber yard it was quite an amazing labyrinthine site and we had artists from all over the world came and they installed objects within the within the timber yard and it brought the neighbors in and it began a discussion about the site and it kind of brought them on side I think and in the end I think that their contrary their support was essential in getting this through planning so this is what houses look like from the neighbors they have these these green roofs with different planting in the different sections of the roofs and it's really about kind of continuing the language of the gardens across across the roofs of the site this is the geometry it was found geometry really a fractal triangular pinwheel fractal it happened to be exactly the geometry of the site so we put it on the site this is the empty site filling it with green the kind of continuation of the gardens around there are 23 party walls on this project so there's a lot of neighbors that needed to be brought on side subdividing it wants to create the courtyard in the two gardens subdividing again to create the roof lights and the planters and then actually further subdividing it in terms of the floor finishes so the bricks are laid in these different patterns and the tiles in the house on the ground floor also they were just big rectangular tiles that we cut on a bias and then arranged in this so there's you can see the bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs below a mezzanine level and then over the kitchen and dining room is a sort of one and a half height space and these are private gardens so you can see this is matinee level roof the section is also triangle the kitchen dining room is in this area and the sitting room is up here and the bedrooms and bathrooms are below and the roof light forms this kind of central pivot in the middle of the space this is the courtyard it's a bit wintery in this photograph it's actually very green in the summer and the landscaping was a very important element in this project I've just been working at a landscaping practice at field operations and so very keen to try to integrate some of those ideas into the project very large amounts of areas of glass fixed glazing and views that were very carefully choreographed so they weren't looking it directly into anyone's garden this is the courtyard it's really the heart of the project it has a table and chairs the dogs play there the children play there it's it's really the the heart of the house of the two houses and it really functions as a communal space it's a bit like this idea of the of the terrace the the Reba project that if this you just roofed this over you know what could you use this space for and then this is the actual space in the house the dining room in the kitchen with the roof light above and here just seeing the finishes with the fractal pattern on the floor and even some little triangles on the kitchen services and bathroom and they're planting on the roofs so this this isn't an infill site I wanted to put it in here because it's in fact the opposite of an infill site it's a house in Switzerland on a mountain and it has 360 degree views all around there's nothing there but somehow while we were designing it some of those principles that we had established in the infill sites began to seep into this project as well and some of these ideas about geometry this almost was fractal as well as self-similar objects that are arranged in a spiral this is the site it's like chocolate box beautiful and there's cows everywhere with bells clanging and I mean it's really something else we became very interested in landscape painting there's a huge tradition of Swiss landscape artists and in any kind of framing views through the the windows in the house so he can see the house and there's really just nothing great is on the hill I just to say that this is north sort of north south very strong prevailing winds here that we were conscious to try to put to create a protective zone in the middle of the house so this courtyard is shielded from those winds by the bulk of the house that that kind of progressively these these sort of objects kind of move around so all the bedrooms and bathrooms are still on the ground floor we just felt that the views were so spectacular that we wanted really to take advantage of those by having the primary living spaces at the top of the house with the biggest windows the biggest views down and also we just thought this is a house where people come to visit rather than the stay all year round and there's just a practical thing of bringing your luggage in on the ground floor this is a studio for a painter the couple are the clients a painter and and she meditates so this is the upper plan we go from the painting studio up the stairs to the kitchen and up some more stairs to the sitting room and then finally up to a small platform where she can meditate but she can also see across the courtyard to the painting studio so they have a kind of relationship across the courtyard without her meditation being spot by the smell of turpentine and here is the kind of progression in the section through the house so it becomes really like a kind of mountain walk like a you're spiraling around a mountain and the roof is also rather like our info projects becomes really important in expressing this kind of mountainous landscape so here it is sitting in the landscape these kinds of sets of roofs and this very large area of glazing facing to the south down the valley and potentially sort of fire pit in the middle and this is the cow path that runs past so the cow kind of can look into your bedroom window meditate and look at the cow so this showing the kind of relationship of the rooms to the central courtyard all these sort of views through into the house as well as outside and so you can see from the meditation space down to the painting studio and you can also keep an eye on people in the kitchen but behind it is this amazing backdrop of the mountains and this is my last slide is just to show the Swiss have this rather amazing thing that they do well the project is in planning they create the outline of the house with these sticks I think normally they probably would have four sticks that would show the button but because it's so complicated it's more like a forest of sticks but it really means you can envisage the what the house would be like on the site and it's quite it's quite interesting this slide I'm gonna pass over to Catherine's gonna go back to infill more serious subjects well well Tanya's been discussing infill sites in the context of private develop developers and individuals I'm going to be looking at discussing infill sites in context of the wider housing crisis developers small developers really shown that it's possible to to get the most out of this unused land which previously had been unviable and until recently local low week we call it the council in England it's the local government had had thought that their own land was unviable as well for these these smaller infill infill sites and recently because there's such a shortage of land there's this huge quite housing crisis in the UK but also at the same time there's been a release of funds to local governments there's this new new thinking that there's potential to to build on public land these smaller developments and the potential is for hundreds of thousands of new homes on these infill lands across London and potentially across the country so this graph really illustrates the sort of story of housing since since post post post war housing so while in the 19 up until the 1980s there was a huge amount of housing being built in London in in fact across the UK with at its peak over 350,000 new homes being built every year in the UK in the 1960s fast forward 2000 and 2010s up until now there's only about 140,000 new homes being built in the UK every year and you can the pink line illustrates illustrates the house price prices and there's a correlation between less houses being built and huge house prices in the UK you can be young well employed but still not be able to afford a home so it's hugely problematic and I think what this what's interesting about this graph is that this top area shows local authorities and their involvement in housing and up until the 1980s when thatcher's government came to power local authorities were really at the forefront of building housing in the UK and they had this visionary sort of lead across across the country and and develop and had an equal understanding to developers and in the 1980s due to the changing government there was that there was no more no more public housing and so there's a strong correlation between the two and now there's this new thinking that we need more housing and therefore local government has to get involved I'm going to look at three three public housing projects just to give you a brief history of UK council projects but also their their projects which we feel are influential to our practice so the first first project is the boundary estate and this is the first example of council housing in the UK it's these all three projects we discuss discuss are in London and it was hugely visionary at time it was built to replace the Victorian slums the the the slums were demolished to replace it with over 5,000 new homes and the these new tenement buildings were were built around the central circus known as Arnold Circus and the public space was a core of the core of the housing and then off each of these buildings there are these secondary public communal spaces which creates which really strengthen the community and this hierarchy of more private and less private community communal spaces is really strong and today there's there's there's still this very strong sense of community in these houses and it's now in the heart of Shoreditch and it's very desirable housing I mean some of it's been sold off and it's private but still a lot of still a lot of public flats in there and the other part of the other influential aspect of this project is they're generally quite simple buildings but there's this very intricate brickwork on all the buildings which sort of breaks down the mass and it is very playful and this this you can see in our in our own projects the second project is Alexandra roads again in London and this was built in the 70s when there was this sort of idealism and vision it's built designed by Neve Brown who believed in creating a front door to every home and creating terraces and a private space for every home and in the same way as the boundary estate there's this sort of interesting relationship between the more public area but also these sort of private terraces cascading down buildings and this we particularly like this sort of canyon effect where the gardens and the architecture really sort of combined to soften the landscape and in fact this project was was developed in response to a very awkward sight it's it's runs there's a railway that in fact runs parallel on this side and the canyon shape was a way of stopping the noise and the vibrations from from the trains the third project I'm going to show is Robin Hood Gardens by designed by Allison and Peter Smithson in the 1970s and this this has been a very much discussed project in the UK in recent years and recently because it's going to be demolished there are currently several hundreds of flats and it's going to be replaced by several thousands of flats and it's been very controversial because obviously it's an architectural icon but to meant to most people it represents the the everything that's wrong with the with the vision of the brutalist visions of the 70s these sort of big hard concrete lands buildings with and they're seen as to represent poverty and in humanity in terms of scale so this this is now going to be demolished and the local tenants of the tenants again be displaced and this has also happened on other other council estates around London and has created a lot of protests but the issue is that there's such a shortage of land land in London that now councils are looking at demolishing certain estates rather than trying to preserve them because there's also this issue of maintenance and there's been very little maintenance to these buildings since the 1980s when some of the flats began to be sold off under fascist government so that there's this there's this sort of movement of demolition with some councils but other councils feel it's more appropriate to try and work with the buildings that are already there and sort of build in between and one such council is Croydon council who we are now working with the Croydon had its own vision in the 1960s with big roads tall buildings it was sort of seen as the forefront of idealism but actually and the reality is that community broken up by the roads and again there's this lack of human lack of human scale and some of the architecture of the 60s and 70s however today Croydon is again at the forefront of this visionary leading leading the way amongst other councils in London currently there's a target to build one half million new houses by 2050 20 approximately 24,000 new homes are being built each year but there's a need for 50,000 new homes and each council around London has a target to build X amount of homes and most of them are failing to do that and one of the main reasons until now has been that it's just been developers sort of filling the numbers so actually councils have been had very little control but now as councils such as Croydon are trying to both develop both larger sites but also these smaller infill sites on their land so they are looking at the moment to develop 50 approximately 50 sites and build a thousand new homes across these smaller 50 sites and there are seven architects involved in that so design design led architects and we we are one of these seven architects so we are working on three sites in in Croydon and they they're all similar sites to those that Tanya discussed earlier and they they're very constrained they've got neighbors in very close proximity around and they've got restricted access as well this is the access on these ones and the main the main challenges is how do you minimize the impact on on the neighboring communities how do you weave into the neighboring communities how do you how do you stop views looking directly into the the neighboring buildings how do you how do you reduce the mass so that you don't have an impact on daylight and sunlight and in the UK planning laws very strict about how much daylight and sunlight you can take away from surrounding buildings and also there's the question of context and building even though these are these are they aren't the most beautiful contexts they are they are still sensitive in a in a sort of planning sense so this is this is the context for two of the sites it's post-war in fact it was built this development was these houses were all built between the 1930s and 1960s and represent the sort of very typical evenly spaced terraced house which are typical of many of the low-rise developments council estate developments of that time and then there are some very few leftover sites but this is one of them a garage site where the access is so narrow that you can't even get a modern big larger car down there anymore and then the second site is over here and another garage site so cold Harbor Road is as I explained garages with the narrow access and buildings in close proximity the in designing the house our first move was to create a block that was set away from the two boundaries so there's a half of public access at the front and then gardens at the rear and by setting away from the boundaries we had less of an impact on the neighbors the second move was to sort of reference the local vernacular and break down the scale so we sort of rotated the roofs to create four smaller roofs the next move was to push the push the building in and out to create a series of to entrance courtyards and terraces above and instead of projecting about balconies out to sort of push them in in the UK planning laws mean that you need an outdoors private outdoor space for every every dwelling so in this particular project there are four four four flats on the ground floor two beds and then four one-bed flats on the first floor this is the facade so we we again looked at breaking down the mass of the building with this sort of playful brick checkerboards using two different colors and also there's a sort of plate play on the dot the light with these recessed pushback spaces in between and the plan is there are two two different two different repeated plan over the overall plan is spitted to and each plan has each each bill or block has a has a communal courtyard which is which is access space for four of the flat so two of them access from ground floor and then the central staircase which is lit from above leading to above and then on the first floor you can see how the same concept of the facade with the plan being pushed backwards and forwards and then creating these courtyards and then this allows sort of dual aspects to put dual aspects for the flats which sort of open up onto these courtyards and then this is showing in this landscaping area and we try and create this sort of intimate area at the entrance with the sort of recessed the recessed entrance areas so there's a sort of gradient of the most communal streets and then it's sort of more private as it's recessed here and then the private terraces above that sort of connect down to the to the public space below and then we looked at creating this diamond shaped pathway to break down the sort of length of the access the next site Thornley Gardens is very similar sites again garage sites surrounded by buildings again we looked at the block offset from the boundaries and then in this case there were particularly difficult angles there's a 25 degree rule in terms of lights from the ground floor window the surrounding buildings so that meant that we had to cut back the building from the boundaries and then again we inserted pockets for terraces and entrance areas and in this case the stairs outside here because we because of viability we can lose additional internal space to staircases so these are on the outside and then these are this is six flats on ground floor and then four flats on first floor and then similar idea of the weave and a play with the brick in this case it's it looks like the same brick but it's a glazed brick and a matte brick so you sort of get this these alternating reflections in the building and then we have this sort of blue metal work that sort of weaves behind the brick and connects the external spaces and the public spaces stands there's this is the section just showing how it steps back from the adjacent buildings and there are terraces stepping down cascading down and these are these are sort of outdoor rooms we had to create the the boundary of the the balustrade at eye level in order to stop overlooking into the neighbors buildings the plan shows again the sort of fragmentation of the building how on ground floor there's this large plan and as the building steps up sort of we get smaller and smaller with sort of more and more terraces being inserted into the house and then this again we we use a similar play with breaking up the external communal area and it's directly trying to address the question of keeping artists in the city and this is quite a key precedent for the local Black Horse workshop which is in Walthamstow and it's it provides a workshop for the local community and for anyone where you can either have training in joinery glazed slot all the way up and the plan itself is very simple in a sense it's got this you've got the central street this is the ground floor plan in the middle of it is this vertical circulation core and all these partitions on either side are sort of flexible but they're potentially art studios or workshops and you can if you want to you can open it all up and turn the ground floor into a giant's gallery but there's also a cafe point here and auditorium space at the back on the upper floors this is where there are 12 artist houses or flats and the key thing about them is that they are mezzanettes so there's actually another two floors on top of these ones that are identical and the key is so on the lower floor of each unit is the living spaces and these can open up onto this communal living area so if you want to you can double or triple the size of your living room and on the upper floors you have the private area so there's an internal stair inside each mezzanette you have bedrooms and bathroom and little balcony and these look how over this double height space it really feels like a sort of internal street and you can see you can talk to someone on the balcony opposite if you want to so this section through that shows the kind of real transformation pink indicates public area and you can see how well if you keep your your doors and walls all shut it would it would read like that you see these double height dramatic communal spaces but if you open choose to open up your living your private living space into the communal space on the right you get you can transform entire floors into communal living spaces and this is all done through this double stable door which every unit has and it's a way of controlling how public or private you want to be so you can change it from completely closed to completely open and these are some images of what it might look like this is the view from the public street inside this new street with the slot visible and this there's an indication of what zones of public and private so the public grounds floor has this kind of smooth scalloped concrete panels whereas the upper private more private floors have these finely ribbed smaller panels which are half the width of the larger ones this is the view inside that double height communal space with the mezzanettes on either side and the idea is by creating these like really fantastic communal spaces you can encourage a strong sense of community and have people who really want to live there and engage with local residents so this is the view looking the other way where you get this quite interesting layered views from the one person's private space through the communal living room into a private living room back outside onto a balcony and this is another kind of series of views but from the public new public space looking through an artist studio into public space etc so these two projects are trying to show ways of densification creating densification by sharing space and therefore kind of allow sort of increasing density without kicking people out of the city there are just a couple more projects to show different different locations because we're aware this problem is not limited to London so this is one project in Cardiff that we won the feasibility study for with learning co architects as a collaboration and it's for five new dance studios and education facilities and cafe and gallery so the big community hub essentially in a sort of area of Cardiff and we did lots of community stakeholder work this shows some feet painting at concentrations that we did with the young classes the ground the whole of the ground floor in this project is also basically a public space we're working again with a historic building and sort of recycling and bringing back to life this old artist from the 80s this interesting building that used to be a cinema in a bowling alley and we inserted some new dance boxes dance studios which boxes and some more sculptural circulation elements to create a new I bring this building back to life create a new identity and what's on the key moves were actually opening up the ground floor completely so it's really glazed and opening up back to the street and welcoming everyone in and then almost the most important move was cutting out this large picture frame window on front of the building which happens to be where the main dance stages so from the public street you can see the main performance dance performance going on and you can't it's all about bringing that out to the public and this is the view from inside that main dance space looking back out at the street beyond and the last project for this this set is called Qingdao Cultural Center which is actually a sort of quite a large former textile factory complex really amazing buildings which is no longer in use and the client is looking to transform it into a art district very much modelled on the Beijing seven nine eight art zone and as we won the competition for this and this is a sort of concept for the master plan which is to create a sort of two main streets one running north south one running east west and with a big communal public space in the middle and the public space is framed by the remaining walls of one of the warehouses with its roof removed is falling down and the first building on the site that is going to be built is this project this building up here and it's working with this old brick structure that had fire and the roof burnt out and so we have in this case it's sort of instead of a linear street it's more about these pockets of pockets of courtyards this is the sort of actual view of it and we inserted a series of glass glass boxes with a new creating a new data level and this really highlights this a regular profile of the old brick building and the old walls and these are these courtyards in the middle and this is what it looks like from the outside and we wanted to reference the textiles that used to be made there so you can see there's this frit on the glass that calls those textiles and again here this is a view of the internal courtyard one of them where the landscape both the landscaping and the frit on top and the actual trees they kind of all have these references to the building's former use so these these projects sort of sum up and in fact the sort of all the projects we've shown show how we're kind of really trying to we could have all approach about prioritising the communal space and letting that be a driver to the to how the organisation of the building works and we're really keen on developing or continuing dialogues with local governments and trying to deliver sort of beautiful new homes and communities for for London and often geometry is a very important aspect of this in all our projects so we thought we'd end with a completely different project to show we do sort of all sorts of things and it's about bubbles and suspension and performing architecture. Okay, thank you. Thank you for that. I have I think it's quite exciting how many of the sort of the themes that you you touched upon kind of resonate with what's happening here at Columbia. I think the the idea of sort of preservation or reuse or recycling of kind of existing infrastructure and buildings and fabric, the kind of entrepreneurialism that I think in a way your office started with with the kind of out yard project, which was sort of self initiated. But I think since there's since there's three of you, I'd like to kind of frame the response in three in three points. And the first point being the kind of question of crisis. You started with kind of identity crisis upon graduation and reconciling, you know, your sort of own interests versus kind of academic, the things which you studied in school and ended on a kind of cultural crisis. And I think I'm also noted your office started on the heels of the kind of financial crisis. And everything then happened within the kind of milieu of the housing crisis in London. And I think it's sort of worth noting. Right now, I think it's fair to say that we're on the on the on the verge of a kind of social or sort of political crisis, both in the case of in the UK with the Brexit, and also the kind of terrifying political reality that we have here in the whole world is kind of looking inwards. But at the same time, I think you you seem to be looking outwards and kind of diversifying and expanding your own practice and pursuing global work like the Chengdao project that you ended upon. And I think that you all exhibit a kind of calm and coolness in the face of many, many crises. And in fact, have a lot of fun, I think, with the foam dome. So I guess the first the first kind of the first sort of theme or question in a way is how does the how does the new kind of crisis the impending crisis, perhaps precipitate a sort of another change in your office or something new or kind of different. Maybe I'll just go through all three points and then you can answer whichever one you'd like to. The second point, I think, which is quite interesting, which we talked about earlier, too, is a sort of interest in housing is a territory for architectural experimentation, I think, in your words, idealism, which was a central concern, I would say, in with kind of modernism, and through the seventies with the projects, particularly projects like the Alexander Road estate that Catherine presented, and I would say that in actually the eighties, there was kind of a from within the discipline, a declining interest in housing and probably coinciding actually with the sort of graph that you showed of the kind of number of council estates, number of housing units built by councils, declining actually coincided with from within architecture, I would say housing became more peripheral. But I would like to claim sort of for our generation, and I think as evidenced by your work, that housing is kind of cool again, and there's a resurgent interest in housing. And I really appreciate that. And I think it's not, of course, not only in the luxurious and in the service of kind of luxury. The third kind of interesting theme, which which your work has, I believe, is kind of geometry, as you said, the figuration, I think, from the kind of the wallpaper in the first project that you showed. But I think it's maybe more accurate to call it pattern, because I think it often involves kind of repetition of geometry at different scales. And it's operates on both the kind of ornamental level, but also an organizational level, particularly in the kind of plans. I think many of the projects you showed actually from the plan, from the plan first, as a way to kind of present the project. In the vaulted house, the vault geometry repeats in the roof, but also the kind of fireplace floors, walls and entrance. In Outsyard, the geometry comes from the kind of city, from the triangle, and then repeats into the kind of perimeter and envelope of the building and into the division of the two units and into the materials and kind of textures. And then I think there's sort of interesting shift then in the kind of projects for Croydon, the drover's yard project with the kind of crosses. In fact, the geometry or the pattern doesn't come from the site, but comes kind of internally through your own move to sort of rotate the grid by 45 degrees, and actually, in a way, kind of react against the context. And I think similarly in the mountain house, it's also kind of an internally generated or sort of initiated geometry. And then I'm quite curious because I think in the latter projects, like the art house, for instance, there is a kind of rigor, also sort of very much a kind of rigor of the plan, but without maybe as much presence of the kind of geometry or pattern or kind of complexity in the project. And so I'm kind of, I guess, the final theme, figuration pattern geometry, I'm kind of curious, like how do you, in a way, use in some cases a kind of floral or sort of figurative pattern versus in other cases something much more orthogonal and rigorous and kind of rigid geometries, which I think are kind of equally interesting. So those are great questions. I don't know where to start. I mean, I think maybe starting with the first question, the crisis question, which would definitely seem to be in a crisis. I think one thing that is coming more aware of is really how you fund architecture in a way, these kinds of projects we're showing, like whether it's public housing or cultural buildings, and it's hard to just rely on the government, like where's the actual money going to come from? I think that's why we're quite interested with the art house project, the idea of could people give back as well and pay for their living accommodation that way. So the idea that the artists would volunteer, essentially, and provide social services in return for this housing, it hasn't really been done before, but there are people sort of starting to talk about that. So I think the issue of funding is kind of increasingly... I mean, there's really no, there's no funding coming from the government for housing anymore. And so in the situation with Croydon, it's not that the council has given money to develop sites, they are cross subsidizing their huge program of sites by developing some for market sale, which can pay for others, which are socially rented. And there's, I guess, a question as to how far can they sort of liberate the land values in order to provide enough housing? And it's certainly very interesting, in pioneering that they're trying, I think there's probably a question about whether it would provide what's needed, which is so huge. And then actually there are going to have to be other ways of providing it. But I think there are lots, you're seeing architects being developers, and councils being developers, and artists being developers, and there's all sorts of different new modes of clients now, I think. And lots of self-build projects as well, and that's sort of becoming increasingly interesting. And this sort of leads onto the sort of housing question that I think as a young practice, in a way the crisis has given us an opportunity to sort of develop our own vision as a response to it. And for example, all these sites we're building on are so constrained that you have to think differently and how can you build something that's viable within these very restrained conditions. You have to come up with a unique solution. We can't build terraced houses on these plots. So for us it's been really exciting to come up with new ideas which these sort of restrictions have created. Yeah, maybe it comes back to the sort of pattern question and how it sort of work both from inside out and outside in. So there's all the site constraints and government constraints, and then there's the brief and how the brief can generate relationships. And I think that the pattern making is, maybe that is the kind of legacy of our American educations, but that somehow that imposing some kind of new parameter that comes from outside the constraints of the site can generate different kinds of relationships between different programs that are sort of more unexpected, more dynamic, not just formally but also programmatically. And I think we're really interested as you sort of highlighted in the relationship not just of pattern and as a form-making device, but also how it functions in terms of the organisation of the building and the relationships between different rooms and views and more kind of programmatic concerns. So it's trying to find a crossover between those two concerns I think. So it sounds like in a way that maybe to kind of paraphrase your reaction to kind of crisis is to sort of actually engage the kind of economic and policy, the economic parameters and the kind of policies that are, you know, leading to kind of architecture. I'm curious though, like in a way I think the given your work, how influence your work is by the kind of infill and the sort of pressures and constraints, like the mountain house then seems to have, I assume, is kind of absent of many of those, more absent of many of those constraints and yet I think you're equally kind of adept at articulating kind of interesting spaces and kind of sequences and... She had very specific strengths. The Swiss laws are not necessarily, in some places I think they do care about whether it looks like a chalet or whatever but here we were dealing just with very specific rules about height, roof pitch, floor area and then I suppose the site itself, although it's not really a constraint, there was an idea that you really wanted to take advantage of all of the view so that in a way became a kind of parameter. And so it's sort of, I guess, wherever you build there are always there are always going to be some kind of legislative constraints unless you're really, you know, maybe in certain areas in China or where there's much less law than it might be different but I think, yeah, all of those projects really grow out of the constraints. So the later projects you identify the more sort of rectilinear and sort of regular geometries in a way, those are all working with existing buildings so we don't just impose these geometries mindlessly on site, we work with what's there too and that's why, to a certain extent that's why they're like they are. Yeah and so I guess that kind of also, I'm also wondering a little bit, I was mentioning last week we had Christian Karez here who's talked a lot about his kind of process and how he kind of seemed like he manufactured crises internally to kind of produce, to kind of generate his sort of work and you didn't talk much about kind of process and is it, I mean all the projects do seem kind of inevitable as you present them as kind of reactions against certain things but what, maybe you can talk about that actually, how does it, how do things come about, is it in models, is it, the drawings are kind of amazing, are they part of the process? I think the plan, the development of the plan is often the starting point and the introduction of some kind of geometrical parameters onto the site, I mean some of them look, they look very simple, they look like they were meant to be Opsiade, looks like we found a geometry and you gave us a plan but in fact it's highly sort of fudged and really it was incredibly difficult to make those plans work and you know the angle of the wall if it's out by kind of you know a fifth of a degree it will completely mess up the other end of the house so everything had to be really really fought through down to kind of very fine detail so maybe there is a kind of certain obsessiveness in the process and maybe also an idea of like bringing things in that make our life really harder than it needs to be but then also this sort of satisfaction of solving that problem that we've created for ourselves and maybe that's why some of the projects are quite unusual looking because possibly no one else would try to push something that really didn't feel like it was working so far is perseverance I think when people join our office that I know this is never going to work it's never going to work and then persevere persevere push push push and then then it works and yeah it's patience but drawings are really important to us as well sort of how you can represent the concept in one one moment so we haven't shown all of them but every project does have a kind of key drawing that captures the ideas and you were actually describing that as kind of in a way sort of counter to your education here where it was like a moment when you know kind of the 3d model and 3d modeling seemed like it kind of eliminate eliminated sort of plans and sections from from architecture but that's when did you kind of when did you realize that or how did that come how did the kind of rigor of sort of plan come back into the work I think it probably came all the way back from Cambridge because that was it was quite quite a retro education in a way there and and I think it was also just a realization that if you play with the plan enough then you can create spaces that are incredibly dynamic once you put once you kind of put them into three dimensions that you don't necessarily know they're going to feel quite like that when you're designing them the plan feels very controlled but then once you once you start to kind of extrude some of those spaces you do get very unexpected results in terms of I mean there was something in Oziad that I realized after we built it that actually the the angles in the house had this kind of effect on the the perception of the space of the house because they kind of exaggerated the feeling of you expect the room to be a cube or a square and the displaying of the walls makes it in fact feel much bigger than it is it kind of exaggerates the perspective and so you get these kind of funny funny things coming out of the actually just working in plan I think that's not apparent and I think a lot of the kind of sophisticated aspects of the art house for instance are kind of dictated by the structure you know the relationships between kind of individual and collective are really dictated by the kind of the repetition or the modulation of of sort of structure and services and and elements within within the kind of plan should we take questions actually I have the impact is even more different yeah I don't think so but we can hear you though I mean I think well sort of for example every what everything's every client is different so in a way it's just like working with another person or another body or another organization and their kind of priorities are slightly different so and their kind of structures are working a different and the way they make decisions is slightly different it's kind of might take longer to make decisions because there's more people involved I think we do a lot of you know often even when the client is a single client there are still a huge number of stakeholders and something which I think is probably maybe a little different in in London that it is here is that almost any building even if it's not in a conservation area has there's an enormous amount of local democracy that goes into whether a building gets planning and so if you don't have the support of neighbors you won't get planning even if it conforms to all of the regulations and it's well within these kind of degree envelopes if it's really not it doesn't necessarily get planning if you don't if you don't bring those people on board so a lot of what we a lot of what we end up doing is actually just that kind of engagement process and I think that works also with clients where there are kind of multiple kind of bodies that you have to kind of address them in such different ways and come up with creative ways of engaging yeah and definitely as the project gets bigger there's so many more layers of that like with Roop and Dance we did so much consultation because it it was just like has dance classes with every kind of age group from like babies to elderly people and and then sort of different like staff members and the arts arts Wales organization so yeah we've done a huge amount of that and I think often it's it's a positive thing for us too we kind of really get to know the brief well and understand what they want hello it's a very quick question I'm wondering if just like thinking about the practice you guys run I wonder if you do competitions because it the projects all seem to be refreshingly direct in terms of who you communicate with even though it's like a larger constituency and in the same line would like to know what kind of keeps you up at night or what gets you out of bed in the morning in other words is there project that you would like love to do right like with all the crisis and like constant problem solving and you know excitement over housing but is there something that like you know that you're like man I want to do like sometimes you know competitions kind of provide which then links back into like you know the kind of global aspect of it in other words like one question we often ask is like you know like how would your project change if it would be in X we do do competitions but we are trying to limit ourselves because they they're so resource heavy and so a lot of a lot of the work that we look for we try to look for it in more direct ways but we we would love to do some non-housing projects I think it's fair to say we all would love to do some cultural projects I would really love to do some more projects that had larger areas of landscape and I think we really enjoy the we're beginning to do these smaller mixed use projects and to work on something with much more complexity would be really exciting and I think we we sort of feel ready for that next step of complexity at the moment and I think the competitions we do do although we haven't won any yet while we're ching ching down and we reckon we they really allow young practice to sort of bring together their idea and create a sort of common theme of ideas so the ones we have done have really sort of pushed us forward as a practice and so it's worth we could keep on doing them and regularly but also looking for other other ways of getting work to you Hello I just want to say congratulations on your projects I love everything that your ladies are doing and I want to know what inspired you I think probably we're inspired by constraints and difficulties and problems and and trying to make still good architecture out of that I guess yeah Hi I was just curious if there was anything specific that your time in the U.S. as students and practicing brought to your practice in London culturally I think there's an amazing energy in in particularly in New York and in the East Coast and in America in general there's a feeling that you can you can do things people are incredibly supportive of entrepreneurial decisions and and that was incredibly refreshing and I think also a certain feeling that you can just be free with form you don't need to necessarily pay too much I mean obviously our projects are very contextual but you know believe me there are meant much more contextual architecture going on in Britain that almost you couldn't tell if it was it was a new project and I think we felt a bit when we were there we felt a bit kind of stultified by that and we wanted to bring a kind of freshness and really try to explore new types and new forms which is is not actually that common to do that in Britain we're definitely considered the sort of bold architects and that's definitely coming from here yeah I mean as I think we could say that our education in England somehow managed to erase the history of formalism so I think we we discovered it to come here was really important hi how was Brexit it's not a change okay I mean I guess the house prices have taken a kind of a hit since since the referendum but is there a silver lining in terms of it's easy to get work overseas or will there be it's hard to know right now I think that we hope that any deal that gets made allows us still to have our staff most half European we have we do have a Chinese member of staff who has a visa so I guess suppose the worst case scenario is that all our staff have to get visas which is a bit expansive but we would do it for them and I think in terms of house prices it's it really remains to be seen at the moment people are very cautious in London and I think until a decision is made we won't really know I slightly think that London is such a it's still such a an amazing city that it will always be a desirable place to live and within Britain it will always be the biggest city so there will always still be a demand for housing and there's so little of it right now that you know that there'll still be a lot of people to house a lot of work for us in that regard but yeah it's it's uncertain times I think the real risks are that the existing communities are all going to have to leave and actually house prices are going to keep keep rising over the long run anyway there might be a dip who knows but we're just we're waiting to see but it has made everyone more political I think everyone has an opinion on it and I was wondering about the representations that how you would present your drawings and plans and everything although you were talking about most of your projects are housing is that a way that you came up with a specific sort of mentality of how you're going to present your project because there's like a continuity and a flow between one project to the other so I was wondering if you can just share with us if there's something that like a platform that you are specific into how you represent your projects I mean in terms of the design process the sort of that kind of works with the representation we're very collaborative in the way that we design so we kind of it comes out of conversations between all of us and sort of crits between all of us so it's the kind of conversation in the office and the representational techniques I think they look more recently homogenous than they used to because we prepared material for the lecture and also for our website recently I think that the process has always been quite consistent in terms of you know the pattern making and the kinds of sites that we've talked about earlier and I think that the the renderings taking on their own language gradually and I think that the line drawings we kind of made a decision to really see if it was possible to draw everything in line in my mind yeah well you're doing that from the beginning that's true it does kind of mirror your work in a way too I think I think you use the word crisp to just kind of describe the the vaults the vaulted house or oz yard and in a way the kind of drawings also mirror that you know sort of the kind of sharpness and precision I think yeah I think maybe especially we're quite interested in being able to communicate quite clearly and directly and so and so the kind of distillation of those drawings into this just very clean black and white drawings we've sort of want to be able to convey the idea just using that technique in a really direct way but sometimes combining different different standard drawing techniques to sort of highlight certain aspects so I don't know if you remember but a drawing we did for Redchart streets it has a sort of section different kind of vanishing points so it's not a real representation but it's sort of really conveyed the concept so we do that quite a lot of kind of impossible unfolded drawings we have time for one last question this one's for Tanya from as alumni what would you say what would your advice for the students here be and what was your favorite studio you took here oh housing studio where we were partners I my advice would would be to set in the podcast too but to kind of hang on to the idealism that you have as a student and you know architectural office life can can be kind of jading and not to let that kind of get to you you need to kind of hang on to the fresh thinking that you develop here and it's an incredible school there's an amazing faculty at the moment and you know you you are getting the best education you could want so really hang on to it and and try to continue it into into the into the real world yeah if you can nice ending point thank you