In 2021:

New collegiate, public and commercial projects including at Oriel College Oxford and Merton Priory.

New uses for landmark historic buildings and urban design including researching and expressing the heritage significance of Oxford’s Covered Market.

New good quality housing in protected sites including developments at Colliers Wood and Mitcham, London.

A new pandemic-resilient arts centre in Tower Hamlets.

Completion of our new care home at Beulah Hill.

Core architecture skills coming even more in focus, building on our trusted networks of consultants and collaborators.

Evidence based conservation – doing imaginative, smart new things in old and new places. Here’s to 2021.

2020 taught. We quipped at the beginning ’20-20 vision’. By March accepted modes of work were fragile and just-about adaptable: we could work at a distance. The role of a design director became, as a rhetorical joke, that of ‘a conductor with members of the orchestra in different houses’. And then the videos of choirs and orchestras doing exactly that – the limitations a-synchronicity. Construction is based on coordination and networks of trust. One brick on top of another. Persevering to principles of conservation, research, evidence, peace-making, professionalism and fairness. This is the basis of all business relationships, especially when tested. Construction cannot be stopped: as most of our economy ground to a halt, construction continued throughout. To our colleagues in this great Industry, and to everyone, we wish you a holy, peaceful Christmas and a creative and prosperous new year 2021.

A new notice board at All Saints Church South Wimbledon, Grade II listed.

I used to play in the Penguin Cafe with Simon Jeffes in the 1980s. We toured in Japan, USA and Europe. At this time such ego-less music was difficult to define. Simon turned me on to musical proportion in architecture and the books of Frances Yates.

Here is a lovely recording from the new Pengiuin Cafe Orchestra, led by his son Arthur Jeffes in 2019 Wheels within wheels. I love the synchronicity.

Music for lockdown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILrIEKaC450&feature=emb_title

https://www.penguincafe.com 

Bestest M

Aerial shot of University College School pavilion – north is top – you can see from left to right: the circular water tank, the grounds building with solar panels and its yard, the oval coach drop off with jagged pavement, cricket nets to the south and then the east and west pavilions straddling the public footpath which runs from the bottom of the picture. Architecture and landscape embracing at an appropriate scale…