Presumably an architectural practice that is developing work around sustainability, which surely will become the direction of travel, must be confident about its future?

Retrofitting is going to be huge. There’s a massive housing stock (and building stock in general) that needs work doing to it and there will need to be architects that have those skills. New builds are going to need a much better standard of insulation so again you need architects with that knowledge. Although whether the government are going to be consistent in supporting this is a challenge because it does need a lot of grant funding. There are many private clients who want to do this and who have the money, but the big question is how can we do this work for those who can’t afford to pay for it themselves?

We would like to see the workforce being reskilled and upskilled. We can put our pens to paper or click a mouse and come up with the most wonderful designs but we need a workforce that is able to follow through with it; and we need a workforce that are confident in handling new materials. A lot of the insulation materials, for instance, are easier to work with. It’s sheep’s wool, hemp and wood fibre, not like the old glass fibre which gives you itchy skin; but tradespeople are not familiar with them.

These materials have all been used, but here and there, in small pockets of places. But the materials that we decide to use are so important. Take wood fibre for instance, it’s carbon sequestering, it locks in carbon from the atmosphere. Hemp is the same and you can also probably grow it in a way that would help with a move away from agricultural monoculture and therefore improving biodiversity. It could be a really positive change. If we can make millions of masks to confront Covid then why can’t we transform an industry in a way that would also create a huge number of jobs. The technology is there; we’ve been growing hemp in this country for hundreds of years.

Then there are the huge range of other building materials to consider in the same way. If you use wood as a structural material, for example you need to plant new forests or woodlands. When it comes to cladding we know that metal is really effective, which means that the materials need to be mined. Yet there are also the existing materials that are out there in old buildings which can be re-used. There is a term – urban mining – that was coined from recuperating electrical components from all of the goods that we have already produced; we’ve have heard that there are more metals that exist in these things than there is left to mine in the ground. This process could be applied to buildings. If we learnt to take down buildings more carefully, salvaged the materials from these buildings, refreshed these materials, then that’s a whole industry in itself. These ideas are sensible and exciting to us as architects; it offers a whole new palette to design and work with. For a lot of people it could mean a real transition to a huge green industry.

Does architectural training really focus on this challenge?

Jacob did his Masters three years ago and it had clearly moved on a long way from when he did his undergraduate degree; although we think in the universities they’re probably still catching up. It is clearly needed at this level, in architectural schools and in construction training and it does feel as though there is a growing movement towards this. There are more and more practices out there that are becoming focussed on sustainability, like the Civic Square project in Birmingham who are collaborating with Material Cultures (that is working on the idea of ‘ecologically safe and socially just neighbourhoods’) as well as the Green Meadows of course.

We’re building the knowledge; it’s there and ready to be shared but it needs central government support to be pushed to the next level. This can be about developing an awareness of the materials that are out there and demystifying them; to get over the nervousness that some feel when a product isn’t as ‘technological’. Of course, the challenge is that there is a constant drive for cost-cutting and natural materials are more expensive. We know that we need more housing, more construction but we have to use more of what we’ve already got. There are 750,000 empty houses in this country, half of the amount that we’re told need to be built, which could be retrofitted. And the houses that are built have to last; you have to invest in quality and sustainability.

We had a talk from Indy Johar at Dark Matter Labs who pointed out that if we want to meet our carbon targets in the UK that we can’t actually afford to be building all these houses. 'When you look at the embodied carbon costs (this is the quantity of carbon that's emitted as part of the construction of a building as well as adjacent processes that occur before and after construction, such as transporting the materials and the way the materials are mined, grown and made), even the construction of many eco-homes is above the carbon levels that we need to reach. Even the construction of many eco-homes is above the carbon levels that we need to reach. We need to be thinking in different ways and retrofitting is a key part of that. But this needs to be done in the right way; if you rush out cheaper external wall cladding (with massive thermal bridges) you end up with sweaty, mouldy houses that make people ill.

What was so interesting when we studied at CAT and Sheffield Hallam was how they valued the social practice side of architecture as well. If you are designing with people, rather than for them, what you design will usually be more sustainable, because you are working with the people who are actually going to be using that space. We feel architecture is a socio-spatial practice; it’s not just about buildings, structures and numbers it’s about how a place is used and how it feels.

So what are the ways in which you embed participation and co-production in your work?

It varies depending on the requirements of the particular community / project and the space we’re working on together. We’ve done a couple of projects with New Art Exchange and this collaborative process has been important to each. For the first project they had an open call to redesign their artist studio space and we were selected. We invited people who had already been an artist-in-residence there and ran a workshop where we’d modelled the space and made an activity sheet with a series of questions that encouraged people to draw or write whatever they wanted over the image of the space, to gather their thoughts and visions. We wanted them to remember spaces that were inspiring to them, what they want from a space if they are an artist-in-residence, to help us get a picture of the variety of different needs and ways in which the studio would be used. You can’t accommodate every idea that comes up but it allows for things that we might not have thought of to come through and one of the things we didn’t expect was the idea that the studio should be something that felt like home, that it should be a place they could relax in, whilst also being practical.

In many ways that process was quite straightforward as the people we were working with are used to having an opinion, of expressing themselves and communicating in different ways. For the next project, a rebrand and refurbishment of the café (‘The Corner’ which opened on February 21st) we engaged with a much more diverse group of people. We built a physical model of the space and asked different groups of people who used or worked in the gallery three questions about it: what did they think of it? what was missing? did they feel represented in this space? We also set up a stall on the street to make sure that we got responses from passers-by and those who live nearby, people who might not have ever been into the café up to now.

We don’t always begin making a model, or a series of images or plans that we ask people to critique. Sometimes it can be more valuable to start with a really good set of questions that are open ended; if they are well crafted the answers you get back are likely to be more useful. Ultimately you’re looking for common themes and ideas; for illuminating comments and phrases which help you understand how people feel about a place, about what they want it to mean to them, how other spaces that serve a similar function might not connect with them. This is the information that we need to translate into something spatial that is functional and meaningful; that feels important to them. Fundamentally it’s about asking the right questions, about listening, about being interested. And these questions, which are always triggers to conversations are central to our work with domestic, private clients as well. The whole design process is a conversation: How do you want to live? How do you want to use this space?

Your website says you ‘seek to create joyful places and spaces for human and more-than-human cultures to thrive in’. What do you mean by that?

Joyful can mean many things; definitely the idea of playfulness but also that when you walk into a space you feel satisfied or uplifted. This emotional response is essential if a space or place is to be sustainable. If you’re going to put a lot of materials, time, energy, labour and carbon into making a space and you don’t get that feeling then the likelihood is that it might not be that respected or cared for or even wanted, and as a result it might not be around for that long.

It's also about the way that we work with the engagement workshops. We want people to enjoy the process. We don’t want to just be extracting information from them, we want them to have interesting conversations, to have fun, to meet people and that’s something we’re continually learning about. Each time we do one we set it up in a different way. Food is definitely something that helps!

The idea of ‘more-than-human’, although it’s become a very current term is actually a really old idea. We’ve a lot to learn about how previous generations dovetailed in to existing ecosystems and produced building spaces that allowed for more co-existence with these ecosystems and biospheres, which is something we’ve moved away from. If you look at the gabled ends of a lot of 16th and 17th century buildings, they would be full of bird boxes or places for birds to roost, and it’s about embedding this understanding into design so that different worlds can co-exist. Biodiversity is obviously suffering and we need to make sure, with the interventions we are creating, that at the very least we’re not making it worse. There are products out there such as bee bricks and roofing tiles with bat boxes in, that can provide spaces for co-existence, and we could push this much further. It’s also about understanding the types of material that we use and making sure they don’t have a deleterious impact on the landscape.

(For information on how to encourage wildlife into your back garden have a look at this previous interview with Dr. Linda Birkin.)

The idea of ‘from the ground up’ also suggests that there is real value in grounded and local knowledge, much of which has been lost and much of which, in terms of the way that people built spaces in which to live, was aware that the climate has always been volatile.

Absolutely. For example there has been some great research and work done by Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, around how we understand and conceptualise rivers. They’ve pointed out that when we draw a river on a map we just draw a line, of varying thickness depending on the river, and we think ‘there it is’. But it’s not a dynamic line; it can’t be, it can’t show the way a river looks over the seasons, the way it shrinks and swells. This understanding of what a river is, this respect for the river and for its floodplains is something that we seem to have lost as we look at land in a strictly economic sense. We build in a way that says we can technologize and control everything; which usually means just moving a problem somewhere else. Older ways of flood management and mitigation are things we need to be learning from rather than this idea of ‘prevention’. We tend to hide away in our houses and defend ourselves against nature; going forward with more extreme weather we need to learn more of this kind of knowledge you are talking about, from wherever it comes.

(Mathur and Da Cunha’s project ‘Soak’, which ‘seeks to change the image of Mumbai from an ‘island city’ once called Bombay to an ‘estuary’ and further, to an estuary in the monsoon’ is really interesting – do have a look!)

Where are you looking locally and beyond for inspiration?

We really want to reach out and connect with other practices; The Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) are a network we know we will engage with. (‘ACAN exists to transform the way our built environment is made, operated and renewed in response to the climate and ecological crises. We seek to mobilise a new movement working towards systemic change, by building an inclusive network based on empowerment’). Sharing knowledge and learning both nationally and internationally so that people can transfer this to their local context is vital. 

We’ve had an approach from Studio Bark in London (‘we are architects for a better future’) and they have funding to make an embodied carbon calculator tool which we will be beta testing, (the process of testing a software product or service in a real-world environment before its official release). It’s something we want to incorporate into our designs but it’s not easy and so this could really help. For instance, it could calculate the carbon cost of fifty square metres of one insulation product against another, including the travel costs. We could then look at how these embodied costs stack up against the operational carbon costs – which material performs best – to develop a really clear picture of how a building will impact the wider environment.

In late March we’re going to go on a little road trip round Europe to visit some practices, one of which is Rotor in Brussels who predominantly work with reused materials, (‘Rotor is a cooperative design practice that investigates the organisation of the material environment’). If there is a building up for demolition they will get a contract to strip the building and will use the materials in another project, or clean them up and resell them through their depot.

We’re interested in the tradition of social housing and community land trusts that you see more of in Northern Europe and which is beginning to grow as an idea in the U.K. Most houses that are built now are semi-detached or detached which in terms of energy makes no sense as you’re not saving heat. People don’t want to hear their neighbours but you can build really well insulated party walls now. Peter Barber in London is doing some really interesting work creating terraces that have pedestrian and shared spaces but also private outdoor spaces.

(Here is a really interesting report featuring case studies from Switzerland, Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark into innovations in design and construction of social, affordable and co-operative housing in Europe).

Co-housing projects, where you have the chance to create a community space around a community group, are really interesting but need to have people with money to buy into them. Then there is work engaged with community land trusts, which is really exciting and where we’d like to go. The London Community Housing Trust has quite a few sites now; Sheffield has started one and I think it’s something that Nottingham needs to engage with.

(A CLT is a democratic, non-profit organisation that acquires and holds land. The primary purpose is to promote long-term affordable housing and sustainable development by ensuring land remains available for community use and is not subject to market pressures that drive up costs. Here is a short film made by National Community Land Trust Network that explains what a community land trust is and how they work).

There is a movement of people who want sustainable housing and sustainable lives, there are projects like the Green Meadows which are uniting communities together through upskilling and sharing knowledge. We need more of this; of thinking from the ground up to build neighbourhood resilience for the challenges of the future. It’s essential that we have united communities to face the challenge of climate change and the political and social issues that will result from this.

Community and social care is the way forward, in people taking on this role and working together. These quiet acts of working collectively to rebuild, like in the aftermath of the recent riots, is what gives us hope and inspiration. Architecture can be quite glamorous, and we do hope that we get to work on some glamourous projects, but a lot of the work we do is quite silent. It will hopefully be an improvement to someone’s life, or to provoke someone into thinking ‘yes, there is a better way to do this’.

Is there any way that people can get involved with what you do?

Once a month we hold what we call a ‘make n moot’ session at the materials store here in Primary for people to come and talk about materials and get stuck in to making something together, sharing and learning new skills. Building the store was the first project we did together and allows the people who work here to store, reprocess and remake materials. We’d love to see you there!

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