September 13, 2024
Director James McGillivray was asked by Building Design to reflect on winning the BD Education Architect of the Year:
The B in NVB (Mark Brierley) was often heard to say that we are just enclosing space for activity to happen. Whilst he was seriously underplaying the skill of the architect and landscape architect, he had got to the core of the question.
The way we work has evolved over a number of years rather than through a single declaration or manifesto and often we are too busy to consider it consciously. When challenged recently, we found that we were clumsy in articulating our ethos preferring to let the drawings do the talking. Winning Education Architect of the Year was therefore a welcome prompt to stand back and consider how we work and what we believe in.
Architecture shapes space for its (usually human) inhabitants. Of course, the critical point is in the quality of that shaping, the consideration of volume, proportion, touch, colour, texture, but if you don’t understand people, you cannot design for them. This applies equally whether you are designing smartphones, trousers or in our case, buildings and landscapes.
This goes beyond just ergonomics. This is about how people experience the building, how they feel about it? Do they move through it with ease? Is the play of light comfortable, inviting?
It goes further than aesthetics. Of course, buildings have to meet regulations and they are there to guide us, and to keep people safe, but sometimes, to use the well-worn saw, the law is indeed an ass. Why should we stick rigidly to the British Standard when we know that there is always a queue snaking down the corridor from the women’s loos at any cinema, concert or sports event you could care to mention?
And as for those ridiculous “Part M compliant” mirrors in accessible wcs which span the minimum height required by the Approved Document and not a millimetre more as if, to comply they have to stick to those dimensions, when it seems perfectly obvious that it is possible to meet those needs but then make the mirror slightly taller so that someone standing up can see in it too. At a push, it might even be possible to consider proportion and elegance.
This is a slightly flippant point, but it touches on the wider issue of how we design for a society with hugely broad experiences of life and almost certainly different experience from our singular viewing angle. Clearly as diverse a pool of architects as possible can help with this and this is something all of us in positions of leadership in practice have a responsibility to encourage in every way possible. Having a design review with people with very different life experience from us in our own team can be hugely positive for design quality, but what about situations where this is not possible? There will be very few architecture studios large enough to create a truly representative team for every single commission.
This is the importance of humanity in our work; where we need to develop our listening and empathy skills, our sense of curiosity and humility, taking careful note before wielding our pencils. We need to be brave in saying “Tell me about that”. Ignorance is not an insult if we are honest and seek to address it.
Collaboration is our preferred mode. The results are always richer and better. I do not mean design by committee. We should always remember that clear design leadership and vision, is a critical part of the role of the architect, but our schooling is never done. Curiosity, questioning and tenacity are all parts of that leadership. We learn new things on every project whether it is working as a team in the studio, with clients, with consultants or consultees. One of the projects in our winning entry for the Architect of the Year Awards required over a year’s consultation with Historic England to get to the final scheme and we genuinely believe it is the better for it. It added an extra level of rigour to the process in having to justify both our client’s requirements and our design decisions. It is the polar opposite of Trumpian courtroom bludgeoning.
There have been many great examples of heroic architecture through history, but they rarely make great learning environments, or comfortable homes, or restorative hospitals. It would be awful for architecture to lose any sense of theatre, but it must be shaped around the experience of the visitor, or resident, or pupil. We are all familiar with the loveless mausoleum, as parodied so brilliantly in the Unhappy Hipsters Tumblr feed all those years ago. I am sure that I was not the only one who felt a twinge of discomfort when scrolling through the soulless images of people sitting awkwardly in painfully non-human houses.
Roland Barthes wrote a beautiful short essay on toys in which he describes the way that wood suits toys when compared to other materials, the way it wears slowly over time rather than shatters like plastic toys, the warmth of its touch. I think about this all the time when selecting materials for our projects. We want our schemes to look great when they are new and get better with age, but even more than that we want our projects to feel great, to be welcoming where we touch, to be hard where they need to be, to be planted where they can.
Our specialism is in education, and it is always pleasing to see how subtle changes of finishes, acoustics, light, air, planting in playgrounds, can have such a radical impact on pupil behaviour and happiness.
Winning the BD Architect of the Year Award has been a wonderful validation for our whole team of the way we approach our work. We were not party to the judges thought process, but it seems no coincidence, that all of the projects we submitted took a holistic approach to inside and outside, architecture and landscape, blending the two disciplines in which we practise. Ultimately though, we see this award as a recognition of all the many fruitful creative relationships we have forged with a wide range of clients, engineers, makers, user groups, consultees and other collaborators which result in better places.
An edited version of this article was published in BD Online on 13th September 2024
