Returning to the office after working from home has made Grimshaw’s Angela Dapper acutely aware of the value of the memories and friendships entwined with practice life.
The most important part of being an architect is to make a positive difference to our built environment. Doing that is what gets me out of bed: crafting how people feel in and experience a place, finding where that positive change can be most pronounced. When we approached taking the photograph for this piece, it was unusual to look at our studio through a camera lens – the photos felt like they didn’t match the feelings we have for it. It is so much more. History, memories and friendships are all entwined in this space: it’s a place of happiness.
It was also so important for me to show the people in my photograph: a huge part of the enjoyment of my work – and that feeling of happiness – is shared with the people I work with. After two years of mostly home working I’ve found returning to the office a delight, and I know I’m not alone: it’s shown many of us the importance of people for collaboration and for our own wellbeing.
The pandemic has also accelerated a changing focus of many of our practice’s projects, reflecting and responding to merging contemporary issues – health and wellbeing, sustainability, social value. While we’ve been addressing these for years, finally clients are beginning to put them on the top of their agenda. It’s a welcome change and a move towards much more human-centric design.
Grimshaw undertakes a lot of large-scale projects. Addressing these merging issues is often felt around a project’s edges where we encourage porosity so they are more integrated into their context. At these boundaries we must understand and respect the memory and continuity that people feel for spaces, so that people feel accepting to positively adopt new ones for themselves.
What this means is that projects not only need to exist within their own context, but need to expand beyond these boundaries to share positive impacts. Buildings can no longer be designed in isolation – they need to benefit people and spaces around them and their environmental and economic setting as widely as they can. It’s about sharing the benefit, but also the joy, experience, memory and friendship we get when we inhabit somewhere. That’s what makes a place – a building, a station, a home, a studio – a positive place, of happiness.
Angela Dapper
London EC1
Source: Architecture Today