The Architect has Left the Building

Jim Stephenson’s film installation The Architect has Left the Building is now on show at RIBA’s summer exhibition, featuring Feilden Fowles’ The Weston. Open until mid-August, the exhibition presents a different look to traditionally ‘neat’ architectural photographs, revealing how people use spaces when left to their own devices.

Nature + Love Project for the Horniman Museum and Gardens is submitted for planning

Our plans for the Nature + Love Project at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in South London have been submitted for planning. The scheme will transform previously underused areas of the estate into new destinations to enable the Horniman to meet its most important objectives to become more inclusive, and to place environmental sustainability and a commitment to fighting the climate and biodiversity emergencies at the heart of its programming.

Poetic Pragmatism Symposium at Waterloo City Farm

Architects, artists, engineers, contractors and students gathered at a Waterloo City Farm in for a symposium on the impact of global warming on architecture, organised by David Grandorge. Five talks were given in the morning session by five relatively young practices, including: Designing for Unknown Futures (Apparata); Houses Made by Many Hands (Cairn); Ways of Living (Casswell Bank); Towards a Low-Tech Architecture (Feilden Fowles) and Building Simply with a High Level of Precision (Maich Swift). More on the symposium write up in the AJ here.

Homerton College Dining Hall has scooped up prizes in the 2023 Greater Cambridge Awards

We are very proud that Homerton Dining Hall has won the Best New Building and Craftmanship Prizes at the Greater Cambridge Awards. The Judges said: “This stunning addition to Cambridge’s now largest college provides a benchmark for what can be done through an ambitious multi-dimensional brief, a sympathetic and visionary architect, a deeply engaged client and a highly skilled construction/delivery team. The use of colour both externally and internally is bold and striking throughout and there are stunning views into and out of the building in all directions. The building glows at night. Homerton wants to be recognised both as a Cambridge College and a college like no other, and the Hall reflects that vision well.” Congratulations to the client and wider project team involved.

Feilden Fowles on working a nine-day fortnight

In this month’s RIBA Journal, Director Ed Fowles discusses how and why the practice have moved to working a nine day fornight, which has had a positive impact on our working culture since we began with a trial in 2022. Read the full article here.

Homerton Dining Hall features in Rowan Moore’s five best projects of 2022 for The Observer

“An open and unstuffy take on the traditional Cambridge dining hall, well crafted but not piously so. It plays with a range of materials – aqueous green faience, pink concrete, a light timber structure – to enjoyable and surprising effects. Along with the LSE project, it’s evidence that much of the money and ambition in commissioning buildings currently comes from universities and colleges.” See the other buildings featured in The Observer’s best five here.

Groundbreaking ceremony at the Natural History Museum

We are excited to announce that following a groundbreaking ceremony at the Natural History Museum, works on the Urban Nature Project are underway to transform the five-acre gardens. The scheme is part of a wider initiative which is working across the UK to develop new techniques and technologies to help us better understand urban nature, creating a new national learning programme to encourage children to get engaged with nature, and support our urban wildlife. More information on the project and progress so far here.