Richard Dudzicki tells AT how cinema, Passivhaus principles and London’s constraints shape a practice focused on retaining what exists, using fewer resources and finding inventive ways to make lasting homes.
The RDA team at their studio in The Old Bakery opposite Peckham Rye Park in south-east London.
Where did we learn architecture? Architecture school helped. Our postgraduate education was cinema – from From Russia with Love to Rear Window. Films taught us about sequence, suspense, framing, light and the strangely compelling lives glimpsed through other people’s windows. Useful training for residential architects.
Why London? London is our permanent film set: beautiful, improvised and already built. Its tight sites, awkward angles and crowded histories force invention. A few centimetres can change the plot. Demolishing all that history to save the planet would be a peculiar twist.
Why Passivhaus and EnerPHit? Because physics doesn’t read sustainability statements. Heat, air and moisture escape whenever the script allows. Passivhaus gives us the discipline to make homes warmer, quieter, healthier and radically lessdependent on energy.
Why collaboration? Because no worthwhile building is the work of a lone genius brooding over tracing paper. Our best ideas emerge through conversation between architects, interior designers, building scientists, craftspeople and clients. The photograph captures that collective process, or possibly an unusually well-attended argument about a junction detail.
What does regenerative architecture mean to RDA? Keep what has value. Repair what can endure. Use fewer resources and more imagination. Make the ordinary extraordinary – and make it last. Beauty matters because people protect what they love.We’re reinventing London one tight site, one house and one stubborn thermal bridge ata time. No car chase required.
Richard Dudzicki
RDA Architecture & Interiors
London SE22
All photographs in the Reinventing Practice series will be on show at Regenerative Design 2026, a month-long programme of exhibitions and events that takes place at the Building Centre throughout October 2026.
