Mission

Architecture should ’speak for itself’. If built architecture needs interpretation or explanation it has failed to connect with its users at the most primitive, powerful and even sublime way. But new architecture nevertheless has to be designed and drawings and models have to be made ‘real’ to those who will decide if they want to make proposals actual. Discussion of architecture is unavoidable. This statement describes our intentions and methods. We illustrate some rather homespun work in the East End of London as well as new buildings and a sea-park in Barcelona.	The Bromley-by-Bow Centre
When we start a project to design public spaces and buildings we think about why and where people go on holiday. We assume they go on holiday to refresh themselves and to have fun, to experience pleasure and the surprise of an unfamiliar environment. Sometimes the surprise will be civilised and largely artificial and at other times it will be uncivilised and ‘natural’. Nearly always it involves exploration.	Barcelona
Holiday originally meant Holy-day; an eagerly awaited time to have ‘fun’ and to contemplate mankind’s relationships with its God or Gods and also with itself. In modern western secular society the contemplation of the divine is commonly replaced by the contemplation of nature and the mutual fulfilment of an individual’s human needs. Healthy has replaced holy as a priority, and sport and the conspicuous consumption of culture and pleasure have replaced the observance of religious ritual as the social norm. ‘Fun’ which was a rather rude word in mediaeval English has become the highest social value of them all.	The Bromley-by-Bow Centre
As architects and citizens we don’t regret the passing of religious and political fundamentalism but the new situation has implications for new architecture. Until the last century architecture generally sought to represent divine or social power and prestige. But in the twenty-first century architecture is also expected to represent the power and prestige of each and every individual within a democratic society; -what New Labour call ‘choice’. As citizens we now expect architecture to help us make sense of our existence as autonomous consumers of the wider social and privatised environment and the natural environment we have begun to threaten.	Barcelona
This demand that architecture helps us feel comfortable in a threatening world is not, in itself, entirely new. It applied also in city states like Venice since their foundation, but the rules have changed: curiosity has replaced belief, whilst supplication to the power of the wealthy and the powerful and the ‘good’ state have survived intact. We might imagine ourselves as voyagers on a sea of global capitalist consumption with few maps and no sense of depths over which we float and an embarrassing fear of rocks and whirlpools. Yet no man is an island, each man is part of the Maine. Most of us still need roots to flourish. But our roots can be a source of division and strife. We need to find the roots that are common to us all and which are less of a threat to the natural environment.	Venice