St Edward's Rhubarb Issue 5

ST EDWARD’S r h u b a r b

5

the choices and how this affects the brief and the overall project. A few of us teach at universities, and I teach at The Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design in Whitechapel, which provides a useful space to interrogate these issues. It is an exciting time, and living in London, we are directly affected by the cost of housing and housing problems. Whilst challenging, it feels like we have had the opportunity to work together as architects in the first instance because of these challenging circumstances.

has moved away from a pure focus on buildings and now encompasses more enlightened planning and policy. There is a culture in which people don’t value the time and ideas of the architect and many people are giving away their time and ideas for free in order to develop their career. Whilst studying I admired architects who made beautiful buildings, and now I care more about those who have an interest in the decision-making process and how things are built. We are increasingly interested in the source of

area of the city, symbolic for their social and economic history, destroyed and lost forever. They had begun to plant flowers and paint shutters in order to soften the environment. We were brought in to look at the social problems as an example of wider housing problems across the country. There was a tax incentive to demolish the buildings and build new, so we had to devise a way in which we could restore the buildings at a lower cost. The nomination gave us the opportunity to highlight these social issues and we went into the houses, cleared the spaces and used what we found to refurbish the houses with new fireplaces, doorknobs, and titles. Part of the project includes the Granby Workshop, a social enterprise which produces and sells handmade products for homes, and has created a legacy for the project, the area and the people who live there. What is Assemble currently working on, and how do you work together as a group? We continue to do smaller furniture- related projects alongside bigger building developments. Currently we are redesigning a building façade along the Victoria train line as part of a Transport for London project. We have just won a competition to transform a series of buildings into a new public art gallery for Goldsmiths University, which we are very excited about and will be our biggest project to date. When a new project comes to light at least two members of the team have to agree to take it on, and everyone is working on multiple projects with different combinations of individuals, enabling us to share ideas and encompass different working practices. We are interested in the role of the architect reclaiming it so that it is not too dissimilar to that of the Gothic mason. We are trying to explore the balance between designing on the computer and putting to work the hammer and nails. How do you feel about housing and the future of architecture in the UK? It is a challenging moment, and housing is very complex. Architecture doesn’t have a public voice and there is little confidence in it as the agent for change, but there are more powerful players than ever. Over the last five years architecture

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