Working notes
Written by the people who drew the projects, mostly about the parts that were harder than expected.
- 0111 June 2025
The survey is the design
On reuse projects, the money spent understanding what is already there returns more than the money spent drawing what replaces it. Halden Works cost four per cent of its budget to survey properly and it changed the entire plan.
Elin Marchetti — Founding Director
- 024 March 2025
Fifty lux and ninety seconds
Conservation lighting limits are usually treated as a lighting problem. At Whitlock Gallery we treated them as a sequencing problem, and solved them with a ramp instead of a fitting.
Joss Adeyemi — Director, Technical
- 0319 November 2024
Heating ninety square metres
A house sized for Christmas is wrong for eleven months of the year. At Corran House we split the plan into three volumes with three thermostats, and the running cost fell by more than the build cost rose.
Rhiannon Blake — Associate, Housing
- 0427 August 2024
Against the nearly private room
A meeting room that looks soundproof and is not is worse than no room at all, because people will trust it. Fourteen rooms built properly beat sixty-one built to look the part.
Joss Adeyemi — Director, Technical
- 0516 April 2024
The ground floor lets the building
Giving up six hundred square metres of lettable area at Northgate Exchange looked like a straightforward loss on the appraisal. The building let in fourteen months against a submarket average of twenty-six.
Elin Marchetti — Founding Director