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Fundamental to our practice at Openstudio Architects is connecting people to their environments. We believe that there is a relationship between how people experience fulfilment and joy in places and their sense of responsibility for that place and the environment as a whole.
We know that buildings contribute 38% of total global emissions: 10% due to embodied carbon and 28% in the operation of buildings. There is an opportunity not only for architects to drive changes in the materials and technologies of buildings, but also to design buildings which engage people, foster joy, are valued and therefore outlast many generations. If buildings meet carbon targets as they are built, but lack soul, character and connection to place, their demolition is almost inevitable. The cycle of rebuilding is not only damaging environmentally, but risks creating environments which become increasingly unfamiliar to their inhabitants, and this disrupts a sense of identity and community.
In an age of climate change, we create languages for each of our buildings which are developed from research and understanding the history of the place in which we build, alongside an awareness of the poetic potential of climate responsiveness, in order to connect people and place. We engage with the specifics of history, place, materials, climate, seasons, light and darkness. This design process creates layered structures that unfold with engagement over time. It not only takes cognizance of the many challenges of building in our time, including mitigating carbon impact, but also integrates the visible consequences of this way of thinking into the work itself in order to develop unique identities that ground buildings in place.
We advocate for work that is so specific and particular that it has a sense of quiet disruption and depth. In order to enable the connection of people to environments, we require a shiver in the surface that allows us to notice and appreciate the calm waters of the lake and to invite us to dive in. We need our buildings to act on us, to require us to focus on and engage with what we are seeing and experiencing in order to deeply understand where we are. We are interested in creating buildings that shift people from being passive consumers to active participants, and through this process invest in and feel responsible for their spaces.
Although our practice is based in London, I grew up in Johannesburg, in South Africa – then and now a place of structural inequality in which buildings and landscapes were historically used to disconnect people from places. It was evident to me that everything knitted together; that language, art, poetry, legislation, regulation, mapping, politics and the movement and settlement of people worked as an intricate web in which buildings were created and experienced. I am fundamentally interested in what this wider context means for architectural practice and what the implications are for the cultural meaning and experience of buildings and places. The Frightened Land, published in 2006 (the same year Openstudio Architects was founded in London), is based on my research into the overarching context in which buildings and spaces come into being and how buildings are experienced as meaningful within this context. We carry our histories with us as designers. My personal reaction to the place in which I grew up was a desire to create robust and poetic buildings in which everything is woven together into a place which has integrity and longevity, in which hidden connections are subtly made evident and where people can feel rooted to place.
I also chose to be an architect through a love of physical structures and my wonder at how they could shape space, evoke emotion and engage our senses – enabling both shared experiences and intimate connections. I love how they enable us to notice shifting light patterns, the cool touch of brick or stone interiors on a warm day, the spring and creak in a timber floor, or the sound of rain on a corrugated iron roof. Architecture can envelope us, reminding us to observe and be present, and enables us to use all our senses to fully experience being in a particular environment.
These are the circumstances within which we work as architects. We simultaneously hold an awareness that our work addresses a political, social and environmental world; in tandem with the reality of site, space, material and technology and the sensory experiences of individual human beings. Our buildings become complete physical objects and places that coalesce all the decisions throughout design and construction into an environment that will exist independently of us and take on a life we cannot control and a future we cannot imagine.
Perhaps because I come from a place of fewer resources than northern Europe, as do many of the collaborators in our practice, a sense of economy is central to our work. Economy for us not only means making careful use of resources, both within the project and with regard to climate, but also deriving a poetic sense of place by doing more with less and prioritizing and emphasizing experiences as we design our buildings. Economy includes integrating the complexity that is an inevitable part of designing buildings and wearing it lightly in apparently simple solutions that are layered and gain depth as people inhabit the places we make.
Our goal is to create architecture which becomes meaningful not only to its immediate users, but also becomes an intrinsic part of the place in which it is sited. We seek to create architectural languages that are specific to the place and building, which are not explicit, obvious, extravagant or didactic, but enable unexpected resonances.
There is a tension between the emotions we seek to create with our work and the practicalities of design and construction. On the one hand we pursue outcomes that are intangible and elusive – on the other buildings and places have to be laboriously defined and then constructed out of physical materials. We maintain our ambition for how significant buildings can be, and the experiences that they can support, through careful attention to how and what is being made, throughout the process of design and construction.
Sustainability is fundamental to the way buildings connect people to their environments. This includes not only what they are made from, how they are made and how they perform; but also how the configuration and spaces of buildings can support passive environmental strategies; how they weather; whether they are economically viable to build and maintain; how flexible they are and how easy they are to adapt and change over time. And then there are the more intangible, and critical, questions – do they have a sense of generosity, are they connected with and do they contribute to the city, town or landscape in a way that includes both a sense of history and anticipates an unknowable future? The most sustainable buildings are the ones that are loved and become an intrinsic part of the place in which they are built and are designed to be robust enough to be adapted but do not require replacement.
The Swartberg House in the Karoo desert in South Africa is a passive solar house that develops a poetic architectural language through a thoughtful response to place and climate. In the extreme temperatures of summer and winter, it requires its inhabitants to adjust the house in response to external environmental changes in order to maintain thermal comfort. These actions reinforce the connection between the internal environment and the outside world and bring an awareness of landscape and climate into the fabric of the building and the experience of it. The Karoo is one of the most ancient landscapes on Earth, its sparse human inhabitation and lack of industry results in profound darkness and star-filled night skies. Creating a place which allows darkness to exist, as well as filtering the intense daylight of summer, brings an awareness of the nature of the desert into the experience of the building.
The structure is arranged on an east-west axis – with large openings facing north, directed towards the southern hemisphere sun. It relies on high levels of insulation, together with the thermal mass of the thick brick walls, to modulate the extreme desert temperatures. There are a series of shutters and large glazed openings which together regulate solar gain. The house is opened and closed during the day to either control the heat of the summer – trapping cool evening air into the house – or to allow the harnessing of sunlight in winter, through the retention of the heat of the sun’s rays in the dark brick floors.
The house has been designed to be built from the simple materials that are locally available. It integrates familiar elements and textures in unfamiliar or unusual ways in order to support awareness and engagement. For example, slot windows used locally as vents in agricultural buildings appear in the house as apparently scattered elements, the arrangement of which is precisely generated from stars in constellations visible in the clear dark skies. Hand-thrown rough cast limewashed plaster, used in many historic buildings in the Karoo, is used on the interior and exterior of the building, with a slurry that softens the texture and enables it to appear to be ancient and contemporary at the same time. Using unrefined, traditionally external materials uniformly on the interior and exterior of the building also connects the structure to agricultural buildings and disrupts the smoothness and comfort that characterizes many contemporary domestic buildings.
Similarly, the building connects to the organic structure of the landscape through the shifts and inflections that occur in plan and in the way in which openings are positioned relative to far views of hills and mountains. The resultant loose geometry of the building has an imperfection that reflects the irregularity of the natural world. This impacts the way in which the building is experienced – rather than static and perfectly balanced forms, and linear perspectives, the compression and expansion of space engenders a more fluid relationship as one circulates through the building, akin to walking in the landscape.
Through a series of connections to the history and materials of Karoo buildings, a climate-driven operation of the building, and a spatial response to the landscape, an architectural language was developed that creates experiences and a sensory inhabitation of the building which is specific to the place in which it is located.
Every context demands a different response. In central London we build within a dense city that has been created over centuries. The climate here is temperate, with many sites needing to address the balancing of privacy and daylight. London is also increasingly facing the effects of climate change, and the buildings we design now are likely to face higher temperatures and rainfall in the coming decades. We design to connect people to nature and their environments within this context with languages that are appropriate for each site.
Westminster Fire Station is an historic Grade II Listed building that was constructed in 1906. Our brief was twofold: to convert the existing building into a restaurant and apartments; and to add a low energy, new apartment building to the rear courtyard of the site. We were conscious of a wider project – to develop an understanding of place in this part of London, and to coalesce a language which created a poetic connection between the historic building and the new structure, alongside designing with an awareness of climate change, light and the seasons. London has extraordinary, rapidly changing and variable skies; long periods of gloominess, as well as intense sunshine. For many of us in the studio, these changing skies are part of the identity of the city – joyful and particular. We wanted to bring this sense of natural cycles and light into the central London project, in order to embed an awareness of the changing environment into the fabric of the building, and to celebrate our city.
The material language we developed for this project emerges from several sources: the many horizontally striped Victorian and Edwardian buildings in Victoria; London lightwells (which are often faced in white or creamy-colored glazed bricks); the Portland Stone of the base of the fire station; the internal glazed brick of the engine bays and staircase; and the cantilevered walkways and cast-iron handrails of the rear of the existing building. Together with these material precedents, we were conscious of physical constraints: the urban site; the proportions of the fire station; the compression of the courtyard; close neighbors; as well as the need to limit overheating in the decades to come. We also increased biodiversity and included landscape and nature in the wildflower roof and planted courtyard.
The historic fire station has a sense of time and making by hand embedded into it. Bricks of different colored clays and dimensional tolerances create variable textures around the façade, and pale stone is integrated to create bands. We were conscious of selecting materials for the new building that both resonated with and extended the language of the existing structure. Using textured pearl-glazed bricks, in a horizontally striated pattern, traces the geometry of the rear façade of the fire station onto the variable brickwork of the new building. This creates subtle patterning, reflects the changing colors of the sky, and echoes the horizontal lines of the fire station and buildings in the local area. Controlling the size and configuration of the glazed openings, and using light-colored brick and stone, mitigate overheating on hotter days, while the orientation of the building is also used to maximize internal daylight levels in the winter months. Any change in the skies is reflected in the changing color of the building, and connects the experience of the place to the experience of the wider environment.
The language for this project is developed from history, texture, displaced and reinterpreted materials and the integration of environmental performance and awareness into the way the building is seen and experienced. It weaves the elements together into a rigorously edited whole to create a place which is both familiar and unexpected.
A completely different central London project, Crease House, is unusual because of the number of mature trees on the corner urban site, which form an established grove to the south of the new building. The small site seems at odds with the density of the adjacent buildings, because of the variegated 19th century brick wall that encircles it, and the old trees set within it. This gives it the character of being somehow a fragment of a more ancient time, in which nature was more present in the city.
The spatial and material language of the house is developed by the bringing to the fore a sense of a place which has developed through time, as well as the connection between the daily inhabitation of the new building and the trees – their location, characteristics and natural cycles. The use of 13th century Monk Bond for the brickwork creates delicate chain-link vertical patterns on the building. Along with the trees, it retains a sense of an older London existing within the present.
The shape and form of the building relate to the exposed location on a corner site, and the creation of a secluded and private world, screened from the street, which allows for controlled light to enter. The opaque forms of the west-facing walls, with high level glazed lanterns, contrast with the expansive glazing towards the trees on the south side. Here, in summer the dense green leaves screen the floor to ceiling areas of glass from the sun, introducing an immersive wall of dappled green into the building, and preventing overheating. In winter, the low sun angles penetrate through the trees deep into the interior, tracing the shadows of twigs and branches onto the floor and solid timber handrail. The characteristics of different seasons are used to intensify being present in the house, and to connect the inhabitants to the changing external environment.
The materials of the house also resonate with the colors and textures of the trees – creased bark-like mud gray bricks are used on the interior and exterior; and European Walnut is cut in irregular widths in order to use the whole tree. Materials therefore have a sense of being substantial, and not superficial decoration. The grove of trees causes us to notice the filtered light, and roots, trunk and branches connecting from the dark loamy soil to the sky. Vertical spaces formed through holes cut through the building connect the lower floors of the building to the skylit upper floors, while muted lighting, shadows and rough textures resonate with the sense of being in the garden.
In order to embed a sense of nature in the city, planters are integrated into each floor level, linked to steps and cuts in the building – with deep soil to accommodate shrubs and grasses. An internal garden extends the lush planting into the interior. Together with the material and spatial design, the house creates a sense of concealment and veiled intimacy. The building holds apparent contradictions within it – rectilinear forms and soft timber curves, opaque brickwork and almost invisible glazing, modernity and a more ancient time. It embraces the brightness of the sun and the faded light of a winter day.
The experience of the house is therefore linked to these contradictions, and to maintaining and developing a sense of time and nature. The building is carefully considered in terms of carbon footprint, longevity and maintenance, privacy and openness. The language of the building comes from maintaining apparently contradictory elements in balance with each other, to enable a connection with nature in the city.
We remain convinced of the ability of architecture not only to respond technically to the climate emergency, but also to take cognizance of the poetic potential of human presence and experience. Buildings and spaces can enable intimate and specific connections to place, developed from interweaving history and nature. An understanding of climate is not laid bare, but becomes slowly evident through use and inhabitation. Our connection to nature links both to joy and a sense of responsibility for the places we inhabit.
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