Finlay Ward, Capital Investment Executive at West Midlands Growth Company (WMGC), tells AT how architects can better align with regional economic growth priorities, why a belief in the West Midlands in crucial, and the geopolitics keeping him awake at night.
Sovereign Network Group’s Homes and Place Standard was co-created by its customers and is used to measure a portfolio of more than 86,000 homes across London and the South and West of England. This is against 140 metrics which are underpinned by three pillars: Home, Place and Sustainable Futures. The panel discuss why the new standard presents a crucial shift in the industry’s approach to placemaking and the creation of sustainable communities, and how it seeks to tighten the gap between quantity and quality.
As SNG’s unveil their Homes and Place Standard, their Design Director Antje Saunders share news of SNG’s new framework tender for housing and masterplanning – with space for up to 30 practices – and discusses the housing association’s ambition to raise the quality of affordable housing through collaborative, context-led design.
Jessica Hird, Associate Planner, tells AT what she thinks architects could being doing to better support planners, her biggest red flag when working with architects, and why she’s advocating for the next generation of Town Planners.
Affordable housing demands architects who can balance vision with reality. Sam Galloway explains how Incommunities selects and collaborates with designers, embedding practical, sustainable, and socially minded approaches, while ensuring schemes remain viable, well-managed, and places residents will value for decades.
Khan Bonshek’s retrofit of Milton Keynes’ Pyramid House, originally designed for the 1981 Homeworld, carefully reworks the postmodern prototype for contemporary living through a considered reorganisation of space, light and movement.
ConForm’s extension and reconfiguration of a terraced house in Dulwich uses light, layered views and carefully positioned voids to create stronger spatial connections across a split-level family home.
Set between a traditional shoreline cottage and the Atlantic edge of Galway Bay, ALWA’s low-slung pavilion extension balances exposure and shelter through a restrained architecture that carefully recalibrates the relationship between house, landscape and sea.
The Director of CIVIC Ireland speaks to AT about the upcoming Dublin Social, on how regenerative design in Ireland is changing, and what the Regenerative Architecture Index means to CIVIC.
Prague-based No Architects transform a derelict homestead in the Ora Mountains into a robust and playful retreat, proposing a contemporary model for resistant and environmental design in challenging climates.
From their base in a refurbished victorian school in central Glasgow, Hamilton Hay Van Jonker speak to AT about their love of continuity and change, 'Speed Mentoring', and what it's like to work as 'one chapter in a building's long history'.
In this issue: Becca Thomas visits O'DonnellBrown's Millport Town Hall on the Isle of Cumbrae, Metropolitan Workshop's Neil Deely sets out a vision for the densification and reinvention of our suburbs, Still Standing: Robert A.M Stern's 15 Central Park West, We Made That's Tom Fox features in Reinventing Practice, Materials Library with dMFK, and Piers Taylor's Sydney in My Kind of Town. And much more!
