Lockdown has given Rupert Cook an opportunity to focus on the adventure of launching a new practice and to find a new balance in his personal and professional life.

My lockdown story, is one of transition, leaving ArchitecturePLB, where I worked for more than 20 years, and forming a new partnership, Miltiadou Cook Mitzman Architects (MCMa) with an old university friend Socrates Miltiadou.

Lockdown has offered an air gap, a break from the frenetic patten that developed over many years. It has been a time to reflect, re-visit, re-focus and re-find passions that became hidden and can be the basis for practice.

Socrates and I are articulating ideas that have prevailed over that time; light and view, of making buildings, the sea and sailing, urbanism and context, houses and homes, alongside spaces for learning and education. We are taking time to understand our story, having known each other for nearly 30 years.

My family is fortunate to live in Winchester, a move from London 20+ years ago. I have enjoyed much of lockdown – appreciating the area. Laura and I regularly run a route that takes us south of Winchester across the water meadows and back in past Winchester College and through finely grained streets of the ancient city. Last March the view from my study/spare room was northwards to the local park and, to the south, towards the South Downs, and St Catherine’s Hill, an Iron Age hill fort. For the last few months with our builders returning to complete a deep retrofit, to EnerPHit, I have been relegated to the dining table, a story that many share.

Tim’s photo is in the low-energy house I designed over ten years ago, for my parents on Chichester Harbour, on the plot where my mother grew up. I feel very connected to that place with many formative years spent locally. Drawn in evenings and weekends, it could have been one of the earliest certified Passivhaus projects in the UK. This spring I passed my Passivhaus exam, consolidating many years of interest, bringing extracurricular interest to the core of the practice.

There is now balance in personal, professional and practice life, with train and Brompton to our Primrose Hill studio alongside days in Winchester.

It has been a real time of change. Lenin’s observation that “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” applies to all aspects of life!

Rupert Cook
Primrose Hill, London