ARCHITECTURE OF THE HUMANE
Previous page_ RIBA Civic Trust Award Winner Temperate House, Jephson Gardens Left_ At Brighton Study Centre
dynamic circulation spaces provide social and private study areas Right_ University of Lleida, Spain Far right_ Marriotts and Lonsdale Schools,
Hertfordshire
ArchitecturePLB
forms part of that solid bedrock of good British architectural practice, unflashy, thorough, pragmatic. You feel the architects’ clients choose them as an intelligent and a safe pair of hands in whom design integrity and creativity are combined with the ability to deliver. For their own part, they see
themselves as producing architecture which is consistent – but not under the self-imposed restraint of a house style. What they believe they are consistent about is their concern for the social impact of their work. It’s no accident that over the past decade the practice has mostly designed for communities: housing, mixed-use and the whole range of education buildings from infant to tertiary. Until the launch of its new
identity, the practice had one of those names that caused editors to despair, with lower-case ‘architecture’ in that unexpected place up at the front. ArchitecturePLB would likely reply that up front is exactly where architecture should be – and that the anonymising initials reflect the collective, even collegiate, way they operate. This is not one of those practices where gurus draw up their
ideas in 6B pencil and hand them over to admiring acolytes to work up into finished buildings. This is, on the other hand, a
practice which takes an analytical approach to a client’s brief, chewing over its implications, maybe closing the office for a day to brainstorm it, opening out its detail to investigate wider environmental implications – and whether it matches the client’s real ambitions. Sometimes that has taken them out on a limb when perceived and well-researched needs don’t necessarily coincide. It calls, right at the beginning of a project, for a little tact and a lot of courage to explain to a client that the brief might take a different route and achieve a better solution to their needs. An analytical approach does
not preclude the pleasures of practice, the architects say: ‘We believe in a well-mannered, precisely detailed architecture, which meets the clients’ needs and stands the test of time. But ultimately it’s about making places and spaces where people enjoy doing what they do.’ That is of course the ambition of a lot of architectural practices. However, since 80 per cent of the practice’s current workload is for
028 ArchitecturePLB / 1971–2011 / Essays
former clients, it seems that they actually get to realise their aim. ArchitecturePLB believes that
a degree of modesty is needed for a building to serve as a setting in which life can flourish. So the architects don’t set out to amaze, to design for fellow designers or to impress students. They don’t do iconic. ‘For us,’ they say, ‘the wow factor is when we go back to a building years later and discover its users have made the spaces we designed their own.’ The directors hold a particular admiration for the Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger, whose early buildings encouraged modification by occupants. This is akin, if that’s not oxymoronic, to designing for serendipity. So theirs is not the big-shed,
blank-canvas approach. Although they can’t, and don’t want to prescribe every user experience, they can provide three-dimensional clues and opportunities for people to create their own. As so much of their work involves groups of buildings, or existing assembles, they have to understand how to deal with the spaces among buildings, an issue first seriously addressed by the AR in the 1950s and 60s.
© MIKE JONES
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