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This year the Open House Festival invited six different individuals and collectives to curate strands of the festival programme. These collections and events allowed the selected curators to share with others the buildings, places and themes they felt worthy of celebration and exploration. I was honoured to be asked to put together a collection in response to the City of London Corporation's Climate Action Strategy. Projects in the collection included 25 Cannon Street, 8 Bishopsgate, The London Museum, Citigen Power Plant and Chancery House. The City of London is the financial and historical heart of London. Known as the Square Mile as it covers 1.12 square miles, this densely packed urban environment contains many of London’s best known landmarks including St Pauls, the Barbican, and the Guildhall. Developer and asset manager Pembroke redeveloped 25 Cannon Street with sustainability at its core. Reimagined by architects Buckley Gray Yeoman, the public gardens by Tom Stuart-Smith feature a reflective pool designed in collaboration with Andrew Ewing. In response to the climate emergency, the City of London Corporation has drawn up an ambitious Climate Action Strategy. This wide-reaching plan sets out how the City proposes to achieve net zero in its carbon emissions, build resilience to extreme weather as a result of climate change and champion sustainable growth. The Climate Action Strategy aims to achieve net zero by 2027 in how the City Corporation operates. By 2040 the City intends to be net zero across the Square Mile. The Strategy considers every part of the life of the city, from underground drainage systems adapted to mitigate the risk of flooding to the city’s rooftops through the Sustainable Skyline Taskforce. A Biodiversity Action Plan recognising the importance of green space sits alongside pioneering planning guidance for Developers asking that they consider alternatives to demolition at the earliest stage of the planning process. The latest contribution to the City of London’s Cluster of tall buildings, the newly completed 8 Bishopsgate by architects WilkinsonEyre is a 50-storey building designed as a series of stacked blocks. The building developed by Mitsubishi Real Estate and Stanhope includes high sustainability and low energy initiatives in its construction and operation. Photography by Dirk Lindner Significant headway has been made in how the City is powered, with half of the City’s energy coming from a new Dorset solar farm in the first deal of its kind between a renewables producer and a governing authority. The newly created London Museum will occupy market buildings in Smithfield – saving the historic General Market site for generations to come. A visualisation of the London Museum by Stanton Williams, Asif Khan and Julian Harrap. The collection for the Open House Festival 2023 aimed to shine a light on what sustainability looks like in a city. The collection showed that in an urban environment as compact as the City of London, everything is connected and plays an equally important part in reaching net zero. For example, on offer is a visit to the Citigen working powerplant hidden behind a listed exterior where you can see the evolution of energy from fossil fuels to renewables. As a result of Citigen reaching net zero, the new London Museum - powered by the plant - will become a carbon neutral museum. Hidden behind two Listed Building facades opposite Smithfield Market, and spread across eight floors below and above ground, E.ON's Citigen energy centre produces electricity, heat and cooling to buildings across the Square Mile. Architects DMFK redeveloped the existing building for clients The Office Group, transforming the site into a new flexible workspace featuring beautifully designed spaces including a fitness studio, rooftop terrace, courtyards, and a café.

Elora Hardy is the Founder and Director of IBUKU, a Bali based design practice. Her work has pioneered the use of bamboo to create a series of sinuous, beautifully designed and carefully crafted buildings, including the world-renowned Green School in Bali. Ibuku’s mission is to provide spaces in which people can live in an authentic relationship with nature. Elora studied fine art in the United States and began her professional life in fashion, designing prints for Donna Karan. The buildings that emerge under her direction at Ibuku are gloriously liberated from architectures often constraining devotion to the straight lines and flat surfaces bequeathed by modernism. I spoke to Elora about bamboo, sustainability and that contested word, beauty. Photograph by Suki Zoë VN: A lot of bamboo buildings are being constructed in Bali thanks to the influence of your work. What does it feel like to be credited with creating a bamboo vernacular?! EH: Bamboo isn’t a mission personally. For me bamboo has been a teacher to open these perspectives and then make me learn how to bend. I think that humans need to bend and learn how to dance and flex more with the world around us to make it a comfortable, happy place for us to be in for the long term. So, it’s from that perspective, for a decade of working almost exclusively with bamboo and understanding that we really can think about structure and form from the properties of a material, which I think is a historical norm but not a current one. Let's also consider the landscape and the air and light, which is something that also happens in other sustainable and contextual types of architecture. Bamboo sits at the opposite side of our devotion to modernism and straight lines. We still seem to believe building materials should be uniform and homogenous. It's the mindset that is the problem. I think we’re in a century of wanting to control and apply our agenda and intention and then slot a material into it. In our work we really let the material lead. The fact that bamboo is so unruly and that we've committed to working with it, the exercise of putting our egos and our agendas and sometimes our design intentions in the back seat to let that conversation happen puts us in the really strong position of being dynamic and flexible as designers. I've come to realise it's much more than just allowing the materials to show up and do their thing and have their feelings. We’ve alienated ourselves from having to take into consideration so many things. In many places people are designing buildings that don't account for the climate at all. They are prioritising the style, or a certain modern look over the fact that it's in the tropics and is all glass. I feel like our conversation with bamboo, this unruly material, has led us to have to do so much more listening for all of those other factors at play. Some great work is happening with timber in the UK, but no one is talking about bamboo. We’re very Eurocentric, we’re slow to look around. Isn't it to do with a chicken and egg situation with industry? Bamboo can't be used very easily in its raw form, and architects having to get their heads around the natural irregularity of it and then the craftsmanship. You need to use it in a laminate form. The laminate timber systems for wood are well in place and it should be a simple step to translate that technology into bamboo but in Europe it hasn't really taken off. It hasn't been invested in and you probably have enough wood, for the short term anyway. So, if there isn't a factory supplying it, a builder ready to use it, and a building code already having studied it and certified it, how can anyone really think about it and talk about it. In the tropics we say if you properly harvest bamboo and then treat it to get the sugars out and the salts in, it can have the same longevity as wood because it’s no longer vulnerable to insects. Then the rest of the job is to design it properly so it’s not getting blasted by rain every minute and UV. Any part of a building made of wood also needs maintenance. Material Culture’s new book Material Reform is really interesting. There’s a chapter on maintenance and how we’ve lost the connection to building maintenance in this country. If you had a thatched roof for example, every couple of years the thatcher would come along and do a bit of maintenance and it was all part of the craft of the material and it was seen as normal. Because we've got this ridiculous expectation with materials as being weatherproof and long lasting, they end up being made of plastic The only way to make them make them impermeable is to make them impermeable forever and ever. What I’m interested in is to bring examples and what we’ve learnt from bamboo into the discourse about approach to materials and how to integrate materials into supporting people and space. Bamboo seems like it has so much potential as a sustainable material solution. I don’t think sustainability has actually been a part of any success we've had. It's all been to do with beauty. I like to talk about the way things are sustainable, but I might not even use the word. I might say isn't it amazing that that bamboo grows in three years. The word is just so weighed down, it was just the wrong word, it was the wrong approach. Someone in branding should have gotten a clue in the 80s! It does feel like sustainability has a PR problem! We’re still struggling with that now in a way and I think that that issue makes it easy to parcel it up and slightly stick it to the side which is having a negative effect on the conversation. It puts it at odds with commercialism where it's ‘if it's only 10 per cent more expensive I can afford it, but not 15’. We’ve been accused of things over the years like ‘well if you're trying to be sustainable why aren't you solving housing in urban settings.’ We’re interested in making inspiring structures to take the conversation forward and to be part of future possibilities. Bamboo would have no mileage in anyone's imagination or motivation if we’d set out to make the most effective and most useful relief housing that was in use around the world. Even if we’d done that and solved it, which is which is still a huge challenge to be solved, it wouldn’t have anchored. I think the only thing that anchors things is human interest and part of that is to do with the feeling of ‘wow I want to be there, that's part of my imagination and I wish the future looked like that’. That's what Bjarke Ingels said about us (in the Apple TV series Home); ‘this is like a fragment of the future as you wish it to be’. That’s only place that I really found you catch people’s hearts, when you're saying look this is what the future could look like. Fortunately the clients that approach us might be interested sustainability, they have definitely been interested in beauty and excellence and they've been open in the material palette to be able to say ‘if there isn't amazing bamboo craftsmanship where I am and you don't think it's practical to bring them here, just make me a space that feels like your space, even if you can't do it all with bamboo or in those techniques’. That’s good because it means we are able to hold more of a design authority than a bamboo implementer. Beauty is a word that has been co-opted by the political right in this country, where beauty is normally a pastiche. It’s a word that you can’t use easily. We have to tip toe around all these words! I feel like you have to be careful about it, but I also have some freedom to go ahead and do it as everyone assumes I’m a woman making curvy, hippy stuff so I might as well talk about beauty and emotion! In Sagmeister & Walsh’s book Beauty they talk about what the industrial revolution did to the idea of perfectionism and smooth flat surfaces. Ever since reading that I keep wanting to introduce the idea imagine a few hundred years from now we look back on this weird little blip in human history everyone trying to make everything flat and right angles and perfect. They suggest that even in the context of big factories and producing on mass, it's not the most efficient thing to require uniformity, precision, quality control and perfection. There could be a much greater tolerance for blemishes and variety and for that to be a built-in expectation. That would be a great advantage within the system of manufacturing where we insist on everything being unblemished and that's actually fundamentally inefficient and ridiculous. There's a building in London by Groupwork called Clerkenwell Close which has a stone exoskeleton. The architects worked with The Stonemasonry Company and when they took the stone from the quarry instead of smoothing and flattening it, they've kept all the signs the of the quarry, so you see the imperfections, cut lines and fossils in the stone, it’s beautiful. In the middle of the city, you can feel the quarry. What you're talking about is about the materiality and how it affects the feeling. Another side of this, because we categorise everything the way we do in education and science and culture, running in parallel to this is the psychology of space; the study of the emotion and how spaces make you feel and part of that is how materials make you feel. That's something I want to learn more about and haven't yet figured out where the front door is. I want to connect with that too because these are facets of one thing; the sustainability, how the materials impact on your experience and how the form of the spaces affects the feelings. The final piece of it that I've been thinking about the most recently is when we produce a design concept, we do a walkthrough; a storyboard of the experience of the building from the perspective of the people who will experience it. We say what will we want them to feel along the way and what material will best support that. Now our projects are not even necessarily primarily bamboo. We’re trying to make spaces that create the feeling that we want people to have in them. The material has to be something that we feel good about, and that we also feel good about the story of and the sourcing of and the future of, so that's where it ties to sustainability but in the service of our own self-interest and our own wish to be comfortable and happy, and whatever other feelings we state for the goals in that. Photographs of the recently completed Alchemy Yoga Centre in Bali designed Ibuku. Materials palette: black petung bamboo, hand-made copper shingles, dark ulin wood floor Structural Engineer: Atelier One Crafted by Bamboo Pure Bali Photography by Pempki

VN: How did your stone story begin? PB: My parents were always keen to travel and in the 1970s one of the best ways was by campervan. We spent the first six first years of my childhood travelling every August through Greece, Crete, and Italy. I grew up with the caryatids of the Athens Acropolis as my babysitters! Perhaps the fact that I only visited stone architecture and my name, Pierre, which means stone in French pushed me. My grandfather was a silversmith, my mother always drew and my father, a vet, is good with his hands. When I arrived at eighteen, I had to find a way to survive. The Guild, the ‘Compagnons du Devoir’, took people at sixteen and eighteen. My parents were extremely pleased that I was joining the Guild as it's seen as an elite school for craftsmen. You had an interview and stayed for a week in the House. It's very good because there’s very little hierarchy and you are always accountable. You cannot lie with craft. So long story short; I love history, I love architecture and I wanted to do something with my hands. Is France much better at equipping people and having this this route in? When you join the Guild, you are part of the elite of craftsmanship, but you should always be very humble in what you are doing. We craftsmen are not good at selling ourselves in France. In England, you become a stonemason through a trade or business and then you will go straight into the market. There is a validity of your trade by money. Not in France and definitely not in the Guild; a good craftsmen should be a poor craftsman. That seems a bad price to pay! I was interested in what you say about sharing knowledge of French stone building, so that’s something that sets you apart here in the UK. I sometimes describe the Stonemasonry Company as French touch with English engineering or English flair. I call that ‘Savoir Flair’! Talking about ‘savoir flair’, which is brilliant, how has technology changed what you're doing? With your French knowledge, have modern construction methods pushed the conversation forwards? I think that’s a false idea. I think craftmanship has always been highly technological. There’s a romanticised idea of trades and craft which does not exist. You need to keep the core value of your trade, the respect of the material and the respect of the tools. Technology should be just a tool and shouldn't be the answer to a problem. We use a CNC machine, but we use it to help us to rough out the stone and speed up the process. It should be there to erase the backbreaking part of the trade but shouldn't take anything away from our humanity. When you’re speaking to people about stone what’s the most common misconceptions that you encounter? That it’s expensive which has never been true. If you are building a barn in Northumberland, and you’ve got local stone, it could be a very simple barn with very simple stone. If you are Lord of the Manor and use local stone, you’re going to take the best and it’s how you are going to shape it that’s going to be where the money is. It's a mistake to think it’s expensive. Just take the stone and make as little work as possible on it and it will be a cheap material. Concrete can be a very expensive material if you make some terrazzo or extensive moulding with fine finishes. Estaillades Quarry, France. Photograph by Pierre Bidaud That it’s not strong enough is another misconception. With the right geometry, you enhance the use of a material by good design. To build cathedrals in France and Italy in the Gothic period they had to use the material they had at hand. Local quarries usually had medium strength stone, so it was how you organised that stone to make it as efficient as possible; it’s load path and how it’s going to be distributed in the structure. I think people tend to forget how forward-thinking Gothic builders were. Give me any Gothic builder over a Renaissance builder, their knowledge was incredible. I love the Henry VIII Chapel in Cambridge, it is a very British engineering system, the understanding of the shell structure is amazing. In the antiquity, in Greece and Egypt, to generalise, they used stone as a strong material, working it in a static way. Some people describe it as strength through geometry or strength through material and they are two different ways of thinking. A good example is a Nervi structure. Nervi had an extremely good understanding of geometry, and the way structures behave. You've got fine ribs and an extremely exquisite concrete construction. Another misconception is there's not going to be enough stone. I think there are two fascinating sciences; geology and astronomy and we're stuck in the middle as humans at our scale. We always think of the next 100 years, but stone has been around 200 million years. One day the human race will vanish, and we will be just a little layer on the next cliff. Geology is the science that puts you in perspective, like astronomy. I don't think there's any scientist in astronomy who just sees this one moment. Why was Clerkenwell Close by Groupwork an important moment in stone? I think because it was a sort of ‘disrobing’; undressing stone. Eric Parry did the same at Finsbury Circus with stone pillars. At Clerkenwell Close there is a rawness and honesty with the material. It was one Stonehenge after another Stonehenge. There is nothing more architectural than Clerkenwell; just two columns and one beam on repeat. We were aligned with Amin Taha who said if it’s broken here or there, who cares. It doesn’t mean it’s badly done. It's just that we wanted something fast, affordable, and very pretty. Well, I think it's pretty! 15 Clerkenwell Close by Groupwork – a love letter to structural stone with its limestone façade - in collaboration with Steve Webb of Webb Yates and Pierre Bidaud of The Stonemasonry Company. Photograph by Agnese Sanvito Which European architects do you most admire using stone in contemporary architecture. I think Swiss architects Archiplein are doing well. Mario Botta and Ricardo Bofill made interesting work. Using stone as we are doing? Not many! Immeubles Pierre Massive by Atelier Archiplein, Four apartment buildings built of solid stone, 2021. Commune of Plan les Ouates, Switzerland. Photograph by Leo Fabrizio You said very poetically that the best showrooms for stone are stone cities. I now walk around London looking at all of the stone. If you stand in Trafalgar Square and do a 360 degree turn, it’s only stone. It's insane that most of the stone brought from Portland built London. I love Lyons. It’s a beautiful stone city but there are small villages as exciting as big cities. I think you can only fall in love with a place where you can see that there is enormous care and respect for the material, that will show in the village church and in the town hall. If you are in a quarry in France, the village and everything around that point is going to be built with stone. But that's not the feeling I've got with Portland Island; a lot of buildings are not stone. Portland Stone was used primarily for grand buildings as a show of power. We also don’t seem to be good at ‘local’ here anymore, that tradition seems to have been lost. As one of the first industrialised countries, you very quickly lost a lot of things that have been kept alive in the rest of Europe. What does The Stonemasonry Company aim to do in the next five years? For me it’s essential that stone regains a logical and healthy place in modern building; so we can build schools, hospitals, community centres - all built in well sourced stone, well put together. I think it's something we really need to do. Stone will be back as a commodity and not as a luxury. Pierre Bidaud is Creative Director of The Stonemasonry Company Portrait by Midnightbeastz

Exhibitions are a way to tell stories. Exhibitions capture contemporary thinking in the built environment and can be used as platforms for debate, offering up new ideas and ways of working. At their best, exhibitions can lead to meaningful and positive change. Perhaps most importantly, exhibitions are a great way of bringing people together. As the commissioner, curator and co-curator of over a 100 exhibitions, I believe that anyone passionate about the world around them and their place in it can curate an exhibition. I've put together my top 5 tips to demystify curation and help all those budding curators out there get started. 1. Tell a story - the elevator pitch Plot your narrative: think about what you are trying to communicate. Write yourself an 'elevator pitch' that sums up what the exhibition is about, who the intended audience is, what challenges the exhibition addresses and the results and benefits. For example, for Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed curated in collaboration with the V&A, we wanted to show the importance of making models in shaping the world we live in. Our intended audience was both the built environment profession and the public, and in particular we wanted to engage young people. Knowing our audience helped shape our content to ensure that we had the right mix of models on display. To help us identify the challenges and opportunities of Shaping Space we decided we would organise our content by asking three key questions: Why are models made? How are models made? And who are models made for? Setting parameters allowed for a deeper exploration into the world of model making. By setting out our desired results and benefits from the beginning, we were able to clearly identify our successes. The exhibition was widely and positively reviewed. We had over 1000 University students visit the show and our education programme, including a bridge model making workshop and Sixth Form career sessions, reached 240 attendees. 2. Define your content Using your 'elevator pitch' narrative you can start to define content. Ask yourself which objects best fit with the aims of the project. Sticking to your narrative can ensure that each piece in the exhibition plays an important role in the story. Don't be afraid to mix scale; a large object displayed next to smaller works can create moments of delight. Be ruthless! By keeping true to your intentions, it should be easier to work out which works deserve a space in the show. 3. Create a physical framework A well designed armature for your exhibition will not only enhance the work on show, it will create a 'world' to inhabit, one where the narrative can be told in a clear and captivating way. You may be a student putting together your end of year show, an architect curating an exhibition of your work or a curator working with a designer, but thinking about how your content will be experienced is key. Carefully consider your materials 'language' and colour palette. It might be useful to think about your exhibition design as a brand; with a clear identity. Again, think about your audience and accessibility. Be inclusive. 4. Captions Writing clear, comprehensible and engaging captions is crucial. Avoid industry insider speak that might alienate your audience. Be clear and concise. Brevity is key. Try to avoid putting a book on the wall. Books are wonderful but are best read sitting comfortably. Write wall texts that are too long and you risk your audience giving up before they've started. 5. Think sustainably Even though this point sits at number 5 it's probably the most important. Gone are the days when exhibitions had a brief moment of glory only to end up in the skip. Use materials that can be reimagined, reused and recycled. Think about sustainable ways to produce wall texts. There is some wonderful recycled paper that can be used for exhibition panels. As curators and exhibition designers we have a duty to act responsibly. Most importantly; enjoy the journey! As curators of the Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed exhibition, Simona Valeriani, Harriet Jennings, Mathilde Savary and I worked in close collaboration with award winning architect and exhibition designer Roz Barr. The practice took their use of model making 'as tool to explore form, materiality and to conceptualise an idea'. The design of the show became a scaled up bolsa wood model; a giant 1:1 maquette that created the perfect landscape for the work on show. Photograph: Francesco Russo

Shaping Space – Architectural Models Revealed celebrated the role of architectural models in shaping the spaces we live in. A collaboration between the V&A and the Building Centre, Shaping Space – Architectural Models Revealed presented the world in miniature through a collection of historical and contemporary models revealing the evolution of architecture from the first maquette made as a tool for thinking, to a presentation model. This short film by Chris Jackson is part of a series examining the three questions that informed the curation of the show: Why are models made? How are models made? Who are models made for? Dalia Matsuura Frontini, photograph by Chris Jackson Co-curator Vanessa Norwood of the Building Centre discusses how models are made, featuring works by: Zaha Hadid Architects, René Herbst, modelled by Nicolaas Warb, Álvaro Siza, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), Mary Duggan, Roz Barr Architects, Dow Jones Architects, Adjaye Associates, AAU Anastas, Editional Studio, Assemble and Hayatsu Architects, Peter Barber Architects, Automated Architecture (AUAR), WilkinsonEyre, Sam Jacob Studio, Dalia Matsuura Frontini

The Sustainability Sessions were a series of talks in 2021 devised to explore aspects of sustainability in the built environment. The first series celebrated projects that aim to reduce carbon emissions while giving existing buildings new life. About the David Brownlow Theatre I spoke Jonathan Tuckey about the new theatre in the grounds of Horris Hill school in south east England which is true to the practices's design commitment to ‘building on the built’, for which it has earned an international reputation. The theatre is a masterclass in repairing and enhancing with the new, sustainable building carefully crafted to sit in concert with the neighbouring buildings. The design uses natural materials to create a passively ventilated theatre sited within the wooded setting of the campus. It is constructed of cross-laminated timber (CLT) frame chosen for its cost effectiveness and to reduce construction time on site; its specification has ensured a saving of 40 tonnes of CO2 compared to traditional blockwork. The theatre draws from its surroundings not by replication of the local vernacular, but by being consciously distinct in materiality and structure. The team worked in close collaboration with Webb Yates Engineers. Jonathan Tuckey is director and founder of Jonathan Tuckey Design. Before establishing his practice in 2000 Jonathan worked at David Chipperfield Architects and Fletcher Priest Architect. Having originally studied Anthropology, the varying ways spaces and places can be reused and remodelled has been a constant area of interest for Jonathan's practice and a recurring theme during his extensive teaching experience. Photograph by Jim Stephenson

The Sustainability Sessions were a series of talks in 2021 devised to explore aspects of sustainability in the built environment. The first series celebrated retrofit projects that aim to reduce carbon emissions while giving existing buildings new life. About the Moonshine retrofit Moonshine is a house built in 1786 near Bath, UK, that was originally a schoolhouse for a large country house nearby. It was extended originally in 2002 by Invisible Studio as one of the practice’s first buildings. Practice principal Piers Taylor has lived in the house with his family since 2002, and in the intervening period built various other projects including the practice’s studio in the 100 acre woodland that surrounds the house and which Taylor manages alongside the practice. Taylor self built the original extension, having to carry everything 600 metres along a steep woodland track before the house had vehicular access. I spoke to Piers Taylor about the extensive remodelling of the house to achieve exceptional levels of insulation, airtightness and autonomy. This involved leaving the structural timber frame but removing and replacing floors, walls, roof and glazing.

The Sustainability Sessions were a series of talks in 2021 devised to explore aspects of sustainability in the built environment. The first series celebrated retrofit projects that aim to reduce carbon emissions while giving existing buildings new life. About Castle Acre Water Tower restoration and new build, 2016 I spoke to Mike Tonkin about the practice's award winning water tower. The tower acts as a landmark at the end of the historic village it previously served. The project celebrates and continues the life of the structure by converting it into a home that benefits from its unique form and panoramic views of the surrounding barley fields. The restoration of the tower ensures its existing values are retained by giving life back to its structural system and exposing its robustness and materiality. The tank itself is reused as a living and dining space, and suspended below it are two bedrooms and a ground-floor garden room that allows the structure to integrate with the surrounding wilderness. A separate stair tower to the South is added for access. Post-retrofit Water Tower, External © Dennis Pedersen About Mike Tonkin Mike Tonkin is a qualified architect and landscape architect. He established his practice after leaving the RCA in 1989 and founded Tonkin Liu with Anna Liu in 2001. Mike’s professional practice has been consistently informed by a distinctive pursuit of form and lessons observed from the natural world. The work has been informed by an understanding of vernacular architecture observed during extensive travels around the world.

Hastings Pier was completed in 2016 and received the 2017 RIBA Stirling Prize. I spoke to Alex De Rijke, co-founding director of dRMM Architects as part of the Wood Work series, devised for the Building Centre. The destruction of the existing pier in 2010 by fire was an opportunity to redefine what a pier could be in the 21st century. After consultation with locals and stakeholders the Victorian pleasure pier was re-imagined as a sustainable, flexible platform able to accommodate a broad range of community and commercial uses for years to come. The visitor centre is a 100% cross-laminated timber structure, clad in the limited timber decking that survived the 2010 fire. Alex de Rijke is co-founding director of dRMM Architects, a timber architecture advocate, educationalist and architectural photographer. He is responsible for the concept, construction and delivery of dRMMs timber projects such as Sliding House, Maggie's Oldham and Stirling Prize-winning Hastings Pier. In 2006 he wrote, ‘Timber is the new Concrete’, and introduced cross-laminated timber to the UK with groundbreaking prefabricated buildings; Kingsdale School Sports Hall in London, and the Naked House prototype exhibited in Oslo. Through Alex’s leadership, dRMM has become recognised as a pioneer and authority on engineered timber design and construction. In 2013 de Rijke, alongside AHEC and ARUP, invented the first cross-laminated timber made from hardwood. The beauty, strength and sustainability of the material was demonstrated in the form of Endless Stair at Tate Modern for the 2013 London Design Festival. Committed to timber advocacy and making design culture more public/less elitist, in 2020 de Rijke contributed as a design judge to Plimsoll Production’s 6 part series, ‘Good With Wood’ for Channel 4 TV, to be launched spring 2021. Photograph by Alex de Rijke

St. John’s is a small state primary school, located in the Buckinghamshire village of Lacey Green. I spoke to Clementine Blakemore abut the project as part of Wood Work, a series devised for the Building Centre. I heard how the music pavilion for the school was initiated as Clementine’s final design thesis at the RCA in 2014, and continued as a long-term collaboration with the local community. Focusing on low energy consumption, natural light, renewable materials and community involvement, the project received a RIBA McAslan Bursary, and was shortlisted for the Wood Awards, AJ Small Projects Awards and RIBA Journal MacEwen Awards. The double-pitched timber structure, which was designed with Webb Yates Engineers, is formed of CNC-milled timber members assembled as an interlocking lattice. Phase One was prototyped and fabricated at Grymsdyke Farm, a research and fabrication facility in the village, and was self-built using timber donated by Hooke Park, a managed forest owned and run by the Architectural Association. Fundraising for the second phase began in partnership with the school’s Parents’ Association in 2017, enabling the structure to be enclosed as a much-needed classroom. Photograph by Will Scott Since founding her own practice in 2016, Clementine Blakemore has focused on producing buildings that are inventive, inclusive and have a positive impact on the wider community. Clients include the Design Museum, the Dorset Wildlife Trust, and the UK Green Building Council.

Kit. The word conjures up a travelling salesman moving from town to town, suitcase in hand. The infamous architect with a book of buildings ready to sell; a town hall here, an art gallery there – a kit of parts waiting to be built. ‘Kit’ makes it sound easy; nothing to suggest the deliberation, the slow, thoughtful design process or the specificity of site. Just pick something from the suitcase. Scale model of dRMM's Naked House (2006), a 1:1 kit described as 'a modest manifesto for personalised prefabricated timber architecture'. © Alex de Rijke Kit: The word belongs to the realm of childhood; Lego, Meccano and Stickle Bricks assembled into swaying towers and unsteady bridges, ready to be demolished by unscrupulous four-year-old town planners. Wooden building blocks have enthralled children for around two centuries. The German educator Friedrich Fröbel coined the word ‘kindergarten’ in the nineteenth century, and went on to revolutionize play with his design of a kit known as ‘Fröbel’s Gifts’. The kit contained geometric building blocks that are said to have influenced architects and artists alike. In the United States in 1913, the educational reformer Caroline Pratt took inspiration from Fröbel to create unit blocks, wooden bricks of different shapes and sizes that have encouraged generations of children to think modular, using the blocks as tools with which to explore the social and physical world around them. Devotees of Frank Hornby’s eponymous brand of miniature trains span all age groups. Hornby presents a world of ready-mades to populate a village landscape at a scale of 1:76; it is a kit that evokes the 1920s England of its creation, complete with fish and chip shops, cricket pavilions and village pubs. Hornby’s first foray into kits had come twenty years earlier, when he devised Meccano, a model construction kit intended to teach children the basics of mechanics. Meccano enabled generations of both children and adults to make working models from metal strips, gears and wheels. The appeal of the architectural model can be traced back to our childhood sense of awe at seeing the world miniaturized. A quick trawl of the internet will reveal that the market for architectural kits is booming. It is possible to buy a kit for a miniature Dutch farmhouse with a resin roof and ceramic walls, or, for those with more time on their hands, there is a matchstick modelling kit of St Paul’s Cathedral. Companies such as Arckit aim their architectural modelling system at kids, students and architects alike, with the explicit ambition to ‘open up the world of architecture to everyone’. Kits make designers of us all. The ability to create townscapes in hours is a compelling challenge. The kit and its component parts create a connection to the process of building – a fixing-together with our hands. Representation of Tadao Ando's Church of Light in Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan (1989), rendered in Arckit components by Damien Murtagh, founder of Arckit. © Arckit The scale of a kit can vary from toy to supersize. Kit architecture at a scale of 1:1 retains the magic of its scaled-down counterparts. First exhibited in Oslo in 2006, dRMM’s Naked House is a flat-pack kit designed to be built on top of the container in which the component parts were shipped. Naked House has the feel of a toy house on a massive scale, complete with a cut-out of a human figure. The idea of the house was that it could be dismantled, repacked and re-erected on a new site. It functions as a supersized cut-out diagram with elements numbered for construction, including door and window openings, all digitally pre-cut from substantial cross-laminated timber panels. The kit provides a way of understanding the built environment piece by piece. In the 1970s Walter Segal popularized the self-build movement. Segal’s method proposed an architecture of components – a kit consisting of trusses, walls and beams – that enabled anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of tools to build their own house through the acquisition of skills. Design was demystified, and architecture became a democratic pursuit. Segal used a Perspex model with moveable parts to help families create the best layout for their needs. The first post-and-beam Huf Haus appeared in 1972; a sophisticated, customizable kit of parts using wood and glass as its building materials. More recently, WikiHouse, an open-source technology providing a digitally manufactured building system, aims to make it simple for anyone to design, manufacture and assemble their own home. Hawkins\Brown used WikiHouse’s flexible form to great effect at Here East for its transformation of the former Broadcast Centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. The spatial and structural constraints of the building’s exterior gantry made the flat-packed modules the perfect choice as they could be assembled on site. The conversation about the benefits of kit housing and larger-scale off-site construction is gaining momentum. A kit of factory-made components delivered to site ready to install offers distinct advantages over on-site construction, with its lengthy disruption and noise. Alongside retrofitting, the idea that, having reached the end of their lives, buildings can be dismantled and repurposed through the remanufacturing and recycling of materials is becoming increasingly urgent. The kit is being developed further through new technologies. Block Type A, created by the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Automated Architecture (AUAR) Labs, explores radical new ideas of automating the ways in which we build. It uses robots to construct houses, disassemble them and rebuild them again in different contexts. Block Type A addresses the high cost of land and property and our inefficient use of domestic space by proposing a system that allows us to share both space and belongings according to need. It could be described as a kit to rationalise our kit. The kit’s capacity for speedy construction was exploited by Extinction Rebellion during protests in London in October 2019. The protesters made use of easy-to-assemble wooden blocks adapted from Studio Bark’s U-Build system, and cut-outs enabled them to chain themselves to the modular structure once it was built. The kit transformed into an architecture of protest; a literal and metaphorical platform for action. The kit provides a process that, with component parts, can enable the democratization of architecture. A sibling to the architectural model, the kit is both a system with rules and instructions and a collection of pieces. The opportunities to shape space are endless. This essay forms the 'K' chapter of An Alphabet of Architectural Models, edited by Olivia Horsfall Turner, Simona Valeriani, Matthew Wells and Teresa Fankhänel and published by Merrell Publishers. The book accompanied the Shaping Space - Architectural Models Revealed exhibition at the Building Centre, London - September 2021.

Coffee with curves; Mizzi Studio's kiosks for the Royal Parks I spoke to Jonathan Mizzi about the redemptive power of nature, mixing craft with technology and why sharp angles make us anxious. Most practices would be daunted by designing structures for the Grade 1 listed Royal Parks but Mizzi Studio, led by Jonathan Mizzi, were in their element. The practice is building a reputation for considered use of materials and their mix of craft and technology. They responded to the brief for nine kiosks with organic, curved forms that sit so comfortably in the landscape, it is easy to believe they were always there. ‘Very little in nature is linear, everything has been shaped by the elements. Architecture should be soft because that is how our natural world predominantly is', says Jonathan Mizzi, noting that neuroscience suggests that hard edges provoke anxiety. There is nothing anxiety inducing in the satisfyingly sculptural forms of the kiosks. The curved oak facades illustrate the practice’s commitment to a return to craft as a means to bring a human element to design. Won in a tender with family run café and restaurant Colicci, the practice had an exacting brief from The Royal Parks - the charitable organisation with the mission to upkeep the parks’ Grade 1 listed landscapes - asking for a family fleet of kiosks that echoed their sustainability leadership and ethos. The parks play an important role in enriching the lives of Londoners and visitors to the city, and during the pandemic provided vital places of respite. Jonathan and his family spent most of lockdown in Malta, the country of his birth. The tiny island has been shaped by many cultural influences due to its central Mediterranean location giving it strategic importance as a naval base. The practice has several projects underway in Malta, including a redesign of Malta’s iconic traditional art deco buses. Mizzi Studio were only a year old when they got their first commission from the Colicci family and the relationship has worked well; founded on a mutual appreciation of quality and attention to detail. The kiosks, although possibly the smallest pieces of architecture, had an important role to play in the parks as refreshments zones and wayfinders. The structures needed to sit comfortably within the landscape so the challenge became designing a beacon that was understated yet confident. Timber Fleet, Hyde Park Playground © Luke Hayes The practice collaborated with Tom Raffield, a designer and maker who is expert in the centuries old traditional craft of steam bending wood. A giant jig was used to form the curved oak. The studio picked up the nuances of each park to make each kiosk contextual. Jonathan says ‘we made a family of siblings with the same genetic make-up but with different personalities.’ For St James’s playground, the form became more hourglass and bulbous and the steam bent oak was fully rounded to create a friendly structure in reference to the proximity of a playground. The Green Park kiosk was designed to be more rigid with a straight single curve to lend formality. The Horseshoe Bend Kiosk is situated in view of Buckingham Palace in St James’s Park and is made from tubular brass in reference to the Queen Victoria Memorial. The practice wanted a more ‘regal option’ with some added bling and want the brass to age to add patina, but are keen to avoid the brown colour brass that is not cared for can turn. They have asked that the lustre is maintained with cleaning so that the property of the material isn’t lost. Brass Kiosk © Mizzi Studio The Serpentine Coffee House came with a freer brief but needed to hold its own with the existing Serpentine architecture. Sited at the entrance to Hyde Park in front of the Serpentine Bridge, on the axis of the entrance to Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, unlike the kiosks, the structure needed to house people. The studio designed the structure with the intention of greeting visitors with a smile, taking inspiration from Japanese pagodas that sit within a natural environment, eaves projecting in a fluid movement from the walls. The practice liken the finished café to the appearance of a stingray so that the entry has the sensation of being swallowed by a whale. The Coffee House roof was engineered and fabricated in one giant piece made by MouldCAM in Poole, whose main business is making boats. A forty-metre-long gantry 3D printed the mould of the roof using carbon fibre and glass fibre in a process with no waste. Mizzi introduced a human element, so that the finished structure didn’t feel like a machined building, by spray painting the roof by hand in two tones, with a golden colour and a deeper brown overcoat. The roof was then sanded and hand patinated. On close inspection, the signs of peoples’ hands are visible. Mizzi are the perfect authors of such an endeavour; they are passionate about nature and the positive impact it has on our lives, and the warmth shines through their work. This interview first appeared on the Building Centre site, 2021 Brass Kiosk © Mizzi Studio