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Practitioner Angela Brady brings a fighting spirit to the RIBA presidency, and she’s enlisting architecture’s fellow professions. There’s a lot to do, she tells Hugh Pearman

Portraits James Bolton UNITED WE STAND

ANGELA BRADY BUSTLES UP. It can’t be coincidence that she’s wearing a bright pink dress; she knows she’s going to be photographed and there’s nothing like a burst of colour in these circumstances. Nobody ever accused the new RIBA president of being backward in coming forwards. She’s all about making an impact. No coincidence, either, in the location

she has selected for our meeting: it’s a high- density, 75-unit £6.5m Brady Mallalieu residential development on Laycock Street in Islington, with doctor’s surgery included. The social housing element consists of large family houses, while the flats (with some clever courtyard layouts at ground level) change hands for astronomical Islington prices. The restrained palette of materials includes timber, patinated copper, self-coloured render and concrete. What Dublin-born Brady is doing here is showing that she’s a practitioner, not just an inveterate committee-member (although she is that too, ‘good committees’ as she emphasises) or academic. She knows the trials and tribulations – and pleasures – of getting real things built. With cars banished underground, and a congenial public space with informal seating at its heart that is smaller than a square but bigger than a mews, she describes the development as ‘more of a Dutch or Scandinavian way of living, encouraging neighbourliness. We’ve held a party here ourselves.’ Brady Mallalieu is a well-regarded smallish practice, founded in 1987, which she runs with her partner (also husband) Robin Mallalieu. Six people strong at the moment, it has never been bigger than 10, she says, and that was when they were designing the £35m Mastmaker Road mixed-tenure housing scheme in

RIBA JOURNAL : SEPTEMBER 2011

London’s Tower Hamlets, completed in 2010 and their largest project to date. So it’s no surprise that she champions the smaller practice. It’s brave to take on the presidency – small practices feel keenly the absence of their principals – but she’s coping with this by cutting down on other committee and outreach work (she has served on everything from the former London Development Agency via Open City to the Civic Trust awards). She wants, she says, always to be personally in charge of a project: ‘It’s important that I stay in touch with practice’. She is determined

that her workload should be 50 per cent presidential and 50 per cent practice, which is not easy to achieve, given all the travelling and meetings that the presidency demands. Her strategy is to build a strong team around her. ‘That is the key – surround yourself with brilliant people, then delegate, and give them interesting stuff to do what they are passionate about. But I’ll be captain of the ship.’ One of her particular interests is promoting architecture to the public. This has ranged from the Hackney Building Exploratory to television presenting – even a reality show