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!
The cover of AT343 features Millport Town Hall; a neglected 19th-century town hall on the Scottish island of Cumbrae transformed into a thriving community centre by the Glasgow-based practice O’DonnellBrown. (Photo: David Barbour)
Inside the March-April 2026 issue of Architecture Today:
- A new kind of suburbia: Neil Deely of Metropolitan Workshop sets out a vision – and six key principles – for the densification and reinvention of our suburbs to facilitate sustainable, sociable lifestyles and cater for modern-day demographics and needs.
- Materials Passports: Rachel Hoolahan of Orms considers the advantages and challenges of implementing materials passports, as well as the practical steps project teams can take in order to start using them.
- Fire Safety for Principal Designers: Fire engineer Simón Santamaria of Stantec explores the distinction between compliance and conformity, as well as the tools for evaluating competence and quality in fire safety design.
- Still standing: Ian Volner explains how Robert A.M. Stern’s 15 Central Park West revived the architectural language of the New York apartments of yesteryear to deliver one of the most commercially successful condominium blocks in the history of the city.
- Reinventing Practice: Tom Fox of We Made That explains how the practice’s work is rooted in public participation. Portrait by Timothy Soar.
- Millport Town Hall: Becca Thomas revisits the Scottish island of Cumbrae to find out how O’DonnellBrown has worked with local campaigners to transform its neglected 19th-century town hall into a thriving centre for community life.
- Muzeul Ivan Patzaichin: Peter Bishop pays a visit to an extraordinay museum and community centre in Romania’s Danube Delta that locks into the sustainable networks of one of Europe’s last great wildernesses to support the culture and the future of the Lipovan people.
- Monkton: Sandy Rendel has delivered an intergenerational family home in the leafy village of Cuckfield, West Sussex. John Pardey locates the project within a history of one-off houses that are meaningful, modest and very much of their time.
- Materials library: Julian de Metz and Rebecca Price of dMFK explain how the practice’s rigorous, hands-on approach to material exploration drives its work and informs its relationships with manufacturers and suppliers.
- Ask the expert: Dave Johnstone Technical Services Manager at Michelmersh answers readers’ questions on brick bonds.
- My Kind of Town: Piers Taylor’s Sydney.
