Sarah Wigglesworth: Participation, community and sustainable practice.

Hello and welcome to episode 6 of AS4Architecture with me, Ambrose Gillick. For this episode I spoke with architect extraordinaire Sarah Wigglesworth about her work, practice and design philosophy. We are very apt to ignore the sensory in architecture, the sensory in the tactile, about the textural and all of those things. So, you know, going back to ideas about architecture coming out of weaving and women's crafts and things like that is a great interest to me. But it's also, you know, I really got very excited by the work of Sir Natus. I mean, I love the Lidavallo's work. I love Jessica Stockholders' work, where she'll take, you know, really scrappy old things and put them together in really interesting ways. And that kind of collage of things, I find really interesting. But it's not accidental. I think it's quite deliberate. About architecture, buildings, urban culture and space. Hello and welcome to AS4Architecture. I'm talking today to Sarah Wigglesworth, the architect based in London. Sarah, would you introduce yourself? Hi Ambrose, I'm Sarah. I lead my 10 strong practice in North London, which I've now been running for maybe 27 years, or something like that. That was quick. So, where did you train? So, maybe we could, if we could, it's always nice to hear about where people trained. Because your practice is well known and you're a very well known architect with a great reputation. And I suppose it would be nice to kind of understand your journey to this point. Okay, well, I'll try and keep it brief because I'm a bit apt to go wandering off into all sorts of funny areas. But anyway, so I went to Cambridge University from school, and I did both my undergrad and my masters there. And it was a funny education in that I started when I would say the school was old school, what called, "Arapie texture". It was very modernist, and it was interested in systems and technology. And there was an obvious interest in the kind of Kenonic greats like Abusier, Alto, and so forth. And now that time I was run by Bill Howell. But in my first year, well, actually, might have even been before I went up, he got run over by bus and was killed, and was taken over by Sandy Wilson as an interregnum, who then thereafter became the head of school. And he brought with it a kind of very erudite art-based sort of alter the alternative modernism type of idea, and recruited people like Peter Bundle Jones. And in my third year, he began to recruit people from the AA. So Robin Middleton, an amazing enlightenment scholar, for example, Joseph Rickvirt, Dallibor Vessily, and Peter Karl. So at that point, the whole thing changed. I wasn't very happy with my undergrad and took two years out, and I went to work for Levit Bernstein, which was a complete awakening for me, because it was just so grounded, and down to earth, compared with what we've been doing, sort of, you know, Cambridge colleges, student housing, art galleries, and that kind of thing is our programs. And I really wanted to sort of get the knots and bolts experience, and I did that. And then I went traveling for a year and worked in America for a bit, which was very different and kind of like factory. And then I went, and then I had a massive dilemma, because I didn't want to go back to the same regime. But actually, what had happened was it had completely changed in that two years. And so in the end, having looked around at different places, I decided to go back. And actually, I think it was best thing I did, because at that point it was like, I need to learn what this new regime's got to tell me, which was essentially a kind of philosophically grounded education, kind of middle European architecture, and phenomenology. And suddenly, it's kind of begun to fill in fall into place. And I attended every single lecture that Dalliball gave that year, first, second, third year, which I'd missed. So it was kind of get up to speed really fast while doing his studio. And kind of in a way, it was my making. I mean, it's sort of really just suddenly clicked into place. And then I left, and I didn't renaught to do, because I didn't really follow the, I don't really want to go down a route where I was working for a big name, because I've always been a little bit skeptical of hero worship, and you know, following the stars. And also that kind of, what do you know, what I mean? Ambrose, that sort of patriarchal handing on of the gift from the master. So I actually went, well firstly, actually I did do a short stint with Nicholas Hare architecture, who was working on the competition for the the Covent Garden Opera House at the time, which was eventually won by a god, what they called, anyway, it doesn't matter. And we, so we lost that. And then I kind of lost momentum. And I went to work for a couple of other firms who not well known, and just, you know, trod the boards and kind of learnt, learnt the trade, did lots of working drawings and stuff like that. And then then I got rather disillusioned with practice, actually. And I felt like the debate about what it could be. I mean, that's when it first occurred to me that the difference between practice as in a very practical thing and the kind of expectations that you have as an architectural student for the best kind of architecture, there's just such a mismatch. And I could have find that kind of intellectual stimulation in practice. And so I was wondering what to do. And suddenly someone invited me back to Cambridge to do some teaching. And I thought, oh, that's going to be great. That's going to fill the gap. But the moment I told the person I was working for, that this had happened and went down sort of to tell him the good news. He said, well, if you're going to do that, then we can't employ you anymore. I mean, I think teachers are losers, basically said. And, you know, they're the people who can't hack it in the real wide world. And so if that's what you want to do, then you haven't got a place here. And I was so shocked. I was just, and then, and so anyway, it rolled on like that until I thought cracking, I'm just going to go out on my own. And that stage, I was teaching at Kingston University. And in a way, that was another education, because suddenly there was a bunch of very young people all recruited by Tim Bell, who was the sort of second and command there. And he had actually been tipped off by some people in Cambridge. He'd been doing the end fill there. And so approached me. And I just thought, yeah, that could be really interesting. And there was some amazing people like Catharine Field, Jonathan Hill, Jeremy Joined, Catherine Rurdy. I don't know, Trevor Garner, you know, lots of really interesting people were teaching there. And in a way, it was another education. You know, I was exposed to a whole bunch of new ideas that I hadn't really come across before. And it was great. I absolutely loved it. And being in an art school environment was really, really suited me. I just really thrived under that kind of quite wacky and expansive way of doing things. They had amazing facilities through the workshops and things like that, and a lovely building with, it had been the former art school that had lovely, you know, north-facing roof lights and stuff that a studio is for beautiful. And somehow, because they don't really have a strong research reputation at that point, they kind of gave you freedom to do what you wanted. Actually, and it felt like you could be very experimental under the radar. And that really suited me. I mean, you know, I'm absolutely not an institutional animal. And the moment an institution comes bearing down on me saying you must do these things and you must behave like this. I go, no, I can't do that, sorry. So yeah, temperamentally. So this was in the early early to mid-90s. Is that right? This would have been no late late 80s. Yeah, yes, actually going into the early 90s, yes, that's true, yeah. Exactly. So you're coming towards, because it's a really interesting move. So my architectural consciousness starts in the mid 90s, I guess, when I started thinking about doing it at university, and got that kind of new labour-exciting moment where crazy-shaped buildings are emerging, and Frank Garry's doing his thing in Del Baon. But your work was, when did you set up your practice? You set up your practice at that point in the late 80s, no, it was 27 years before the 1990s. Yes, no, it was in the late 80s. I mean, the era that I went through, when I was in masters, I mean, apart from what Del Baon Peter was talking about, which is this kind of a phenomenological way of thinking about it, there was postmodernism and this reinvention, you know, this sort of reintroduction into the conversation about history and how we reuse history. I was particularly keen on the whole aesthetic of all of that, but the Cambridge School was very, very strong on historical precedent, and we got taught the kind of Bannister Fletcher School of history. And in a way, I was very critical of it at the time, actually, I think it stood me an incredibly good stead for understanding the kind of canon of where we thought we'd come from, not. In when I was at Kingston, I think that issue about identity suddenly came to the fore, and I think that was partly because art, which was part of the conversation being in that art school at Kingston, was becoming quite an important discourse within architecture. And what art seeks to do is to kind of ask questions, it situates you within your practice and your own identity, and it can employ techniques and strategies, which I think can be very useful to architecture, bringing disparate things together to reveal new truths, if you like, which I think were quite important at leading to the kind of architecture that I eventually began to do at Stock Orchard Street, for example. And it sort of adds a kind of critical dimension to that, there's only 90 stuff, which was quite the whole group of architecture, the load of architecture today, that it's also in the late 90s here, early 90s on my shelves there, and it's almost like post-modern pastiche by that. So a doubt that really quite doubtless architecture. So you're kind of using art as a way of adding a kind of critical dimension to this, of contesting it. Yes, exactly. And I, I mean, in the early 90s, I guess, there was a big resurgence of this idea of the body. And I remember Mark Doodick coming up to me and saying, "Oh, who are you?" I'm Sarah Wiggelser, "Oh, are you into the body? Oh, God, how boring." Everyone's into that, and walking off, and I was like, "Oh, really? I thought I'd just discover it." So you're going to have to, there's two things. I wondered if you might sort of unpack. So phenomenology, how are you interpreting that specifically within this kind of, are we talking here about a material kind of terrestrial, textural idea, or is it something more, because phenomenology is very difficult for you. Yeah, well, look, I'm, I'm no philosopher, and I couldn't, I couldn't possibly try and explain what Dalliboran Peter understand by it. But I suppose what I took away from it, from the sort of philosophical dimension, which is, you know, meloponty and people like that, is that there is a kind of situated body with respect to the world. So, you know, there are things which we accept like gravity, and that we're upright, and that we have an outlook, and the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west. You know, those kinds of very, I mean, pragmatic and practical things for an architect, but actually often, I find architects aren't really aware of or not very interested in. And then I think being female in a very masculine environment, certainly at Cambridge, really brought home to me that actually, my experience of the world is quite different from a lot of other peoples. And so that added another dimension. And of course, the body thing is really critical thinking about that. So, I mean, in the early 90s, I was reading a lot of French philosophy, you know, the French feminist philosophers, and thinking about different ways of understanding the world through your situated body. And that kind of was really important to me, and that led to desire and practices ultimately, with people who were like-minded who brought those ideas together to try and do something to kind of question, understood and received wisdom around the being that experiences architecture, if you like. So, desire and practices, this publication that comes out from what '94, isn't it? No, it was actually published in '96, but it was the record of a series of events that happened in '95, and we were plotting it from probably about '93 onwards. So, it was sort of set up by myself, Duncan McCork-Dell and Katarina Rudi. Katarina taught with me at Kingston, and Duncan was at the Barlett, who was doing PhD at the AA with Mark Cousins, and we just thought we needed to put a bomb under current sort of traditions and conventions and ask very awkward questions. And actually, when we decided to hold it at the RIBA, it really was to hold up a mirror to the institution saying, why are you not addressing any of this in anything that we do? And I mean, I still think of it as being quite radical. I mean, we, we sought papers from all over the globe, and we got some really interesting things coming in, and it was very sort of panoptic in the sense that it looked at practice, and it looked at concepts, it looked at concepts of sort of disability, it looked at eco-feminism, it looked at drawings, and the way that we make architecture. I mean, it just, it had queer theory in it. I mean, it really was, I think, quite amazing in its sort of breath. And then we had these 12 exhibitions, which were in venues all around London as well, and the key really was to try and move from theory to practice and show how these things could be put into action. And so part of that exhibition was at the RIBA, but many venues were elsewhere, and they, you know, a lot of people who have become quite well-known, like Pete Barber, Matrix, Ruth, please Luxembourg, who's an amazing photographer of urban spaces, you know, they've gone on to really glittering careers. So in some ways, I feel like, you know, we spotted some really great talent quite early on, and I think the book is still really interesting. It's got a lot to say about the way we still do things, actually, which is possibly a bit depressing. No, I think, I mean, yeah, undoubtedly, a little bit depressing, certainly, in relation to what you're talking about, for example, as a woman in our protector, where there has been tracksuit, so your practice from back in the day, and the way that you wrote about it, has, as I said in my email to you, it's sort of become embedded, it's sort of a bit like participation in our context. It's one of these things that we do now, whether we do it very well, not just neither here nor there, but we do, we think about sex and gender when we design building. But I was wondering whether you could, what you think the substantial changes, that moment that you were part of, that you helped form, have affected, has there been a radical shift, has there been a meaningful shift in the way that, for example, the female body is represented not only in building themselves, but in modes of practice, which, and the modes of delivering architecture, drawings, technologies, and so on. Or are we still dealing with a kind of patriarchal model of architecture production? I think it's a really hard to answer. I mean, I think we're probably still doing very patriarchal ways of delivering architecture, and that's because we live in quite a technocratic and financially controlled environment, capitalist environment, in other words, which hasn't changed that much. And in fact, if anything, I think is possibly made the inclusion of issues around identity and the body worse because by levering requirements to engage with people into the plan of work, there are no more fees to do that. You just have to do it along with everything else. And I think technology has become more alienating in the sense of, you know, you could sit down with a piece of paper with people and scribble and do all sorts of things like that. And you can do that, but ultimately we're being asked to work in 3D, BIM, whatever. And that is kind of an alienation, isn't it? You know, it's mediated by all sorts of parameters and technology, which make it much more difficult for people to engage with that. So there's a bit of a split, perhaps, between what we're being asked to reduce in terms of information and actually engaging people. So, I mean, I guess what has changed is, I think there is now a real recognition that communities who inhabit their environments, their homes, their schools, their, you know, the high street, et cetera, all of those spaces that people use every day, they have actually an amazing knowledge. And we have to tap into that. Because in the end, I do think this, that architects are sort of therefore quite short space of time. And we're here to try and help spatialize and form the culture, sort of make manifest, if you like, the culture relationships that already exist. So have to tap into that knowledge. I mean, whether how well we do that is a moot point, you know, we'll never get to a truth. But I think we need to pick up on nuances, which people tell us and make those meaningful and relevant to them. So, which obviously, how do you do that? How do you do that in your practice? Well, we do that by meeting people and talking to them. And the more you do it, the more probably deep and nuanced your responses can be. But they're always circumscribed by money, by the time you can spend to do that. Also, it depends very much on how you do it, because it's about who you reach and how you reach them and making space for them to feel comfortable where they can put forward their views. So that is riddled with all kinds of cultural issues. It might be about time and when people can meet you, you know, they might have caring responsibilities, or they may be unable to, I mean, from a culture where they're not encouraged to speak up. And so, and they certainly wouldn't speak in front of men, for example. But yeah, their experience is very different and needs to be heard and responded to. So all of these things are really problematic. And trying to get to some kind of optimal, I mean, I wouldn't say truth, but, I mean, sort of some sense of what this community is about and stands for in its values is hard. And I'm never completely done it, but I think you have to do it as much as you possibly can within the parameters of your project and persuade people to make that time and space, you know. So obviously we have, you know, we have this kind of obligation within particularly housing level, but various forms of development in cities where you have to, you have to consult with people. And that can be one of events. And I've seen that done a number of times. I've done them myself. And you know for a while that you're kind of sort of a mickey takeer, isn't it? Can you do a much more embedded thing? So you're going to meet the communities you learn about the community. Well, we try, we try, you know, I mean, often the decisions about how it'll be done is done is upstream from us, you know, and we're just sort of responding to what the client or the, yeah, the person who's funding it is prepared to pay and how much time they want to give to it. But do you think that there's something, I mean, one of the things that I kind of believe, and I'm perfectly ready to be put right by an actual practicing object here, but the architects have a body of knowledge and expertise, which is very profound actually. And we kind of delegate ourselves in terms of many things, but we're actually, you know, the architects have to be very wise and know a lot of stuff. And they make, generally speaking, quite good decisions about what the shape of places and spaces should be. If they're not something within a participatory activity where really what you're doing, as you say, is you're trying to find out their values, but actually in terms of say, for example, the design aspects of things, you're the master there. And, and you, in a way, it's ineligant to go and ask non-designers to, you know, like, I don't think we're necessarily asking people to be designers. I think we're asking them about what their kind of preferences or prejudices might be or how they regard their, you know, backyard or things they want to do within the building or whatever it is. And I mean, I think, I think it is quite discursive. I mean, it might simply be, you know, where do you live? How do you move around this place? You know, asking about daily routines and things like that? Things they're familiar with, things they like or dislike or whatever, whatever. And then, but our role is always to try and express those things or spatialise those things or move forward in one way. And I think the designer has a massive role in that. I think that issue is to communicate that back to people and say, you know, this is what you told us about your lives or about, you know, what you do here or you want this feeling to be about. This is what we understood from that. Is that what you think, you know, and read it back? But I think we have a massive role in giving shape to some of those things, which people are not familiar with how to do. And we should feel proud of that. You know, that is what we've learned in architecture school. And I don't feel at all kind of apologetic about adding that to what people tell us because that's what we're here for. Yeah, I was looking at some of the work on your elegant website, by the way. Very nice to use. The sound will make the primary school. What's on for? Was that, that was an, oh, what was that? Is that a project? No, I love that building. I love that building. It's a very, very interesting building. It's a very beautiful building. Yeah, really nicely designed sort of sustainable school. So you've got, you brought it into that. Both I think, because when I was looking through various ones of your projects, maybe you want to stop, stop opportunity to do this as well. But that particular school and other work that you've done there, this idea of the body and, and you create environments, not, I suppose, totally dissimilar to the work of someone like Peter Fugner, where you've got a wheel to create a kind of complexity, which enables people to see and be around each other, but also to create, you know, the necessary isolation that's applied in the school and so on and so forth. And then you also marine in your knowledge around sustainability and materials and, and health and well-being into that environment. So it's like a sort of, sort of, a co-productive, a co-produced environment, it gives me that impression. Well, I'm glad because I think we are always looking to pick up clues from the people we speak to who are, you know, resident in the communities we work in. And in the case of something like Sandal Magna, it all started because the school wanted an eco-school. And the head said, well, you know, you've got to build it out of brick because that's the local vernacular, and we have a built a brick building before. So that started a conversation, but then we felt it was an opportunity for us to work with cross-laminated timber. So then that got added to the mix. Then we felt, well, both of those things could be then fair-faced so that we make the materials, the building is made of very apparent to the students and it manifests exactly what it is on the tin, so to speak. And so the whole kind of eco agenda began to develop from that. Then of course, we were very, very interested in fabric first approach and making it a passive design so that the fabric would do most of the work for you with, you know, natural ventilation and windtowers and so on. So, you know, and gradually, gradually, the agenda for the building is sort of emerged out of that. And in a way, it ended up being looking like a kind of baby factory in a way, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say that school is a factory for children, but I mean, I think, you know, it's a working class, ex-col mining, you know, terraced house sort of typology in that area. And we were kind of tapping into, but making us a civic statement around a familiar environment, you know what I mean, and giving a riff on that so that it did all the things that needed to do for the brief, but it also felt familiar. And in Stockford Street, I think that, for example, I think that agenda was rather different because there we were trying to experiment, you know, and it's a kind of ongoing experiments will keep changing it, but experiment in what a kind of urban eco house could be, again, using passive principles, but much more collagey, you know, this idea of kind of crashing, things crashing into each other, like high tech, things with low tech things, and sort of, and in a way through that, asking questions about why does anything have to be thoroughly high tech, you know, and what do we mean by that anyway? I mean, I think we're a bit narrow in the way we think about what a high technology could be, you know, I mean, maybe a very, very dense straw bale is actually quite a high technology, if you want a really good insulation, you know, why not, that's the great bat actually. It is as soon as I mean, and a lot of things that manifest the site technology are actually quite crafted and put together by hand anyway, and a lot of architecture is really a kind of collage of sampled materials that get stuck together in some way, and the difference is to do with responsibilities, so you try and get somebody to take responsibility for an entire package that involves windows and cladding, you know, and, and, and, and, and all of it gets wrapped up and called the cladding system, you know, but actually it's lots of different things that come together. So I think we are kind of trying to manifest something around that actually a lot of technologies actually quite crafted. Yeah. Mostly that's a quite, quite an interesting one, and it does, I mean, it's very different from the Sunwell Magnus School, as you pointed out, you know, so you use this word familiar, which I thought was really interesting, you know, trying to create a sense of familiarity, but also in units, and, and, and to use the materials and the spaces of the materials, and the perspectives of give, that you are able to encounter the materials and the architecture. It gives it kind of communicates the radicalness of the idea as well, but it's not what should speak is quite clearly a radical, but it's also both of them are very material, and that comes back to this idea of the phenomenological in your work. Exactly. I think, I mean, I, I do think that's of great interest to myself, and, and probably as a theme throughout the work, because I think we are very apt to ignore the sensory in architecture, the sensory in the tactile, and the textural, and all of those things, so, you know, going back to ideas about architecture, coming out of weaving, and women's crafts, and things like that is, is of great interest to me, but it's also, you know, I really got very excited by the work of Sir Nartis. I mean, I love the Liddabalos work, I love Jessica Stockholders work, where she'll take, you know, really scrappy old things and put them together in really interesting ways, and that kind of collage of things, I find really interesting, but it's not accidental. I think it's quite deliberate, and sometimes when we've been accused of sort of having too many materials, and, you know, two this and two fruity and high cholesterol and all the rest of it, actually, mostly it was quite carefully considered, and, you know, with references to things which were, you know, well, sort of researched and thought about before we went for them, so if it takes something like the Sandbags, you know, which actually are a mechanism to keep the noise of trains down, basically, so it's a self-built item, that's number one thing, it was done on site, it's also a reference to a kind of, I suppose, we're in a pretty gritty urban environment, and we don't particularly like this noise from trains, you know, so there's a kind of emotional echo in that perhaps, it's obviously got a whole sort of resonance around Churchill's bunker and war and, you know, the urban jungle and all of that type thing, and I, you know, to us, that's just funny, that's sort of a silly aspect of it, but especially when you see the Sandbags with the Tower above, it's actually slightly sinister, but then the windows are framed in old sleepers, and so it looks like the last gun fight, the Urkharal, you know, and there's all of these kind of visual references, which I think are quite fun in a way, and it sort of, none of it was really, none of that side of it was really thought about, but I mean, but it was all about trying to make something that encouraged others to think of simple techniques which could be made on site, didn't require masses of skill, actually, that was sort of what it started off being. And you've been doing work on it recently, trying to bring it down to, uh, kind of insulated. Reinsulated? Well, a number of things actually, so it started with that we thought, after 20 years, we would perhaps do an eco retrofit, because, you know, what was cutting edge 20 years ago was actually designed to 1996 building ranks. It's not very good nowadays compared with where we've come. I mean, you know, arguably we could do a lot better, but let's just say that things were caught up. And, um, we also had this 20 years of post-doc capacity evaluation. So we knew what worked, and we knew, uh, you know, we liked to sit and all the good things about it, but what we did was commissioned a load of, um, studies, so doing things like, um, thermal imaging and air tightness testing and new value calculations with probes through the wall. And, uh, we looked at energy bills and we got someone to build past, past, model of it, looking at energy consumption and so forth. So that identified a whole number of areas which we knew we could improve, and where, for example, we were having cold bridging and losing heat through that. And it was not too easy to re, um, to replace some of the kit, which was sort of getting to the end of its life. I mean, typically, air source, sorry, the NVHR was sort of coming to the end of its life. Uh, we felt we needed to replace a boiler. That was also about to end, you know, blah blah blah. So it was an opportunity to sort of redo all of those things and do do much better. And we pretty much pulled the place apart bit by bit and air tightness taped up a lot of stuff and then replaced it and insulated, for example, under the undercraft, we replaced some windows, we replaced some very leaky roof lights with much better roof lights, solid roofs with roof lights in them and things like that. Um, but, you know, I think it's, oh, and also we spent a bit of money just doing things which we ran out of money for, like putting a decent oak floor down and things like that because, uh, it had to have been plywood. And it suddenly feels really cozy and really solid for the first time ever. And we've cut our carbon emissions by 62%, which is absolutely amazing. Yeah. I mean, we could have gone further had we spent a lot more money, but it really cost quite a lot. And, but at the same time, Jeremy and I decided we wanted to stay here into our all-arranged. And so we took the opportunity to make aged friendly. And I just finished that project at, uh, Sheffield called the dwell project, which was designing for well-being in environments for later life. Um, so there's a grant funded research project which, um, meant we, we're designing, um, dwellings for older people, you know, so they could thrive. And using all of that knowledge, applied it to stock orchard street. And so we've worked out where we can get a lift. We've, um, made, we've kind of put handrails in various places so that we can walk around safely. We've got a walk in shower. We've made the downstairs into a suite where a carer could live independently if they wanted to with, um, you know, utility room and so forth. So which is kind of almost independent from us. So we've made a lot of things work, but there's a lot that's really good about it already because got brilliant daylight. Um, yeah, and it's just very delightful place to live. And if you like a place, you're going to care for it. Yeah. And, um, you know, we need to, we need to make it work for us getting as we grow older. And we wanted to do it before we got into a sort of crisis situation, which is typically what most people do. Yeah, exactly. Panic architecture. The, um, this idea around bodies. So, uh, we've been talking about sustainability without using the word sustainability, talking about the technical side of it. Um, and, and your work has always foregrounded sustainable thinking, but in a very holistic sense of the social and cultural and, and, uh, and the economic side of, um, as well, as the, sort of the big three sustainability. And, and I was wondering before we talked about that, I was just thinking about this idea of body and this, this situated kind of mode of practice and the architecture that comes off the back of that. So you've been working with absolutely development corporation on them. Is it a new town? I can't, I can't work it out. I mean, I lived, I was over there yesterday. I can't work out because the new town or just the new scene. Um, and your work, so you're working at a really big scale at this point. Yeah. Does your, does your kind of philosophy, this kind of, um, yeah, bodily, phenomenal logical, um, justice, more justice orientated architecture, work at the scale of big developments, like that. How does it operate in that space? I think it's more difficult for it to work at that environment and less, in that, in that scale, unless you have control over a lot of the things that control those kind of environments. So, I mean, an absolute, I guess, the issues that, um, exercise us were about in a way, um, justice, it's a food justice, um, access to open space justice and transport, because there's a, it's riddled with infrastructure going through EBSP, which includes, you know, the high speed line to Canterbury and beyond the high speed to the continent. It's got the A2 Old Watling Street, you know, blah, blah, it's got loads of infrastructure. And what the river, it's got the river, of course. It's got the river, that's right. And but what's not really working at the moment is the kind of movement at a local level between riverine communities and other places in the, in the area, including, um, you know, the bits which will eventually join up to form to make the healthy garden city, of which, you know, the centre is currently out to planning, outline planning, and which will be aggregated around the international station. And that's the project you're working on? Well, we're working on a tiny site within that master plan, which, um, you know, doesn't exist at the moment and requires a massive amount of infrastructure to happen. And we're not quite sure how or when that will happen because it's all got to get funded, et cetera, et cetera. But it's inching forward bit by bit. But I mean, I think, I think, um, the, the building we were designing within this master plan is called the Health and Wellbeing Hub. And it's essentially a community facility, which, um, offers social prescribing activities for people as well as healthcare. And it's a new model for how to deliver healthy a life for people by not giving them a pill, you know, not, not giving them what is sort of the traditional way of treating people. But, well, yeah, exactly. It's about your whole body, actually. And, you know, if you present with, say, um, depression, it might be that you're, um, the care navigator sends you to somebody who unpacks what's going on in your life that means you're depressed. And it might be, you know, that you're lonely or it might be got financial worries or it might be you've got housing problem or it might be you've got problems within your family. It could be all sorts of things. And actually they're treatable, but, but not as a medical problem as something else. And so, it offers all sorts of other ways of potentially dealing with these problems. And it needs to link up, you know, the voluntary sector, the medical sector and the local authority sector. So it's an absolutely fantastic idea for what future care can be in the community. But self-care, you know, and it involves intergenerational housing as well. So the idea that you're not reliant on buying care in, but, you know, it comes from family, kinship networks, neighbors, people of different ages offering different skill sets and so on and so forth to each other as a kind of informal way of looking after each other. But I mean, the food thing is really interesting because we're in the garden of England in North Camp there. And yet, um, you know, many of these communities do not have access to good, fresh, healthy food. There's no market there. And the nearest sort of place to buy food is a big supermarket. And it's difficult to get to. So everybody drives. And it suffers all the traditional problems of, you know, of our society, which is obesity, heart disease, you know, diabetes and so on and so forth. And it's trying to unlock how to solve those problems, but through daily life rather than see your doctor. Yeah. It's really really interesting. And I mean, it gets quite deep into what's really, really going on in the community. And there we did a lot of engagement with people, yeah. What does that mean? It loads. Lots and lots of interviews, lots of meetings, lots of group meetings, lots of discussions with EBSB Development Corp. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. It's a really nice section on image, sexual image on the website about it. It's almost like you're, you're talking about it like, I mean, the risk with a place like that as far as I can see is that it turns into some kind of enormous urban sprawl, the very extends of houses for people who work in London or. Yeah. But that's what they're trying to not do. EBSB, you know, there are people at EBSB who are guardians are trying to not do that and trying to make sure that it's something radically different from what has come before. I think the issue for other architect is you do need a kind of vision regarding of the concept of the vision, you know, that can hold it throughout the very, very long periods of time, it'll take to produce this architecture and probably it'll happen way beyond, you know, my involvement in it. And I think that kind of golden thread of who is the sort of guardian of this this vision is absolutely critical because, you know, in all the machinations are trying to get it done. If that's not held onto, it will get diluted or, you know, corrupted in some form or another and it will be a sort of pale vision of what, you know, it could be. I think it's really interesting that you did a research project to kind of form this, this 12 project. I mean, how did that come about? What did that look like? How does an architect as busy as you? How does an architect? Well, that was while I was at Sheffield and, you know, as a kind of practitioner academic, I was sort of looking for a way of finding a research project which could use my skills as a designer. And then this thing just popped into the ether, a call from Heffke, where three funding bodies had got together. And presumably someone further upstream had had a really brilliant idea of trying to bring these three funding bodies together. So arts and humanities, social science and engineering, EPSLC. So kind of joint fund this thing, not in the same proportions, it must be said, AHRC was quite a small portion, but that was the design element of it, to try and sort of crunch this problem of how to design neighborhoods and housing, which address well-being and mobility. And I mean, I'd just been through a period where my parents had gone through a very, very difficult demise and ended up dying, both of them for different reasons. My dad had dementia, my mum had motor neurone disease and, you know, it didn't end well, and they really struggled to sort of cope during their latter years and sort of three years of absolute hell and watching, you know, them kind of go through this period. I was sort of, it made me think, my goodness, there's a massive job to be done to try and make our homes fit for aging. I think, came along, I thought, God, this is a no-brainer, you know, it's got design, it's got it's got engineering, it's got this really interesting agenda around age and what, you know, the lens of age could tell us about how we all live, actually, because I mean, age, it's not just older people, it's young, it's tiny tots, it's babies, you know, and it's the people who care for them and all the rest of it. An aging is basically, it's a process and, you know, we tend to think of it as being, you know, young adults and going through families, but actually it's sort of bookended by these sort of two events of birth and death. And I think we overlook that at our peril, and I think I suppose the big takeaway from what we learn was that, or at least, if I could kind of paraphrase it a bit like this, it's like, actually, if you can design for this older age group, you've basically designed for everybody, actually, because you're looking at people with all sorts of kind of disabilities, all kinds of abilities, and you're making spaces big enough for them to adapt in the longer term. It does have implications for size, size of dwellings, and we came up with a kind of optimal dwell size of dwelling, which is somewhere between normal, I mean, the building rigs sort of M4-2 and M4-3, and that was really interesting, because actually the implication is if we really want to make long-lasting dwellings, they've got to be bigger. Actually, the drift is to make them smaller, with some microflats and things like that, because of affordability and so forth, but actually that's not really the longer term way to do it, and also kinship models, because different families live in different ways, and I think increasingly younger people who can't get on the housing ladder are forming their own kinship networks of living together in shared households, which suit their lifestyle more than living in a kind of nuclear family. So, I mean, I think, you know, we need lots more of every type of dwelling, but we definitely need to think about older people's dwellings as well. Yeah, as an issue of justice, you're right, I mean, I often think that when I, my own parent, my father's older now, and you know, usual things with being older, and sore legs and whatnot, and the world becomes very complicated at that point, and even a home, you know, if the public realm is difficult, the home can become extremely difficult, so it's kind of, it's a really interesting, it's a conundrum for the aging population that we have the housing stock that we're at the moment we're updating to sustainability, but importantly, as you have been doing in your own home, updating it at the same time for accessibility, and as intergenerational living as well. But this issue of how do you do, how does one design for holistic sustainability, just to flow the huge question at you just like that? I mean, it's very difficult isn't it, because as I said, again, in my email to you, they seem to pull in separate directions. How can you have economic growth and environmental justice, and what environmentalism? Yeah, well, okay, I'm not sure we can have growth in the way that we have known it up to now, economic growth, and I think that is a sort of horrible truth that may be dawning on us. I mean, as we get poorer and inflation is rampant and energy goes up, you know, to levels where, you know, in a way, perhaps we should be paying more for energy, because perhaps we're too profligate with it, and we need to think about actually making our buildings much more resilient and not using so much energy. So, you know, optimizing our daylight and insulating our homes much better so that we are not having to use energy. I mean, and that's what everybody's telling us that fabric first has got to be the way to do it, but we have a really old building stock in this country, so retrofitting it is going to be a really big issue, and not cheap either, because it's very complicated to do it well as a whole house affair rather than just a sort of single item. And then, of course, we've got to decarbonize our grid, and I guess we've got to live in a way where we are happy to live using less of everything, you know, including energy, actually. And I think that's a switch to shame that the discourse isn't really more about that in the big, white world, but I think the current weather we're having has suddenly made people really wake up to the sort of finiteness of all sorts of resources, like water, for example, that's so very evident at the moment, and the energy bill crisis, you know, with the sort of switching off of the gas from Russia and all that, is really drawing attention as well to our vulnerability if it runs out and so forth. So I think the conversation is really beginning to change, but I think the key for me is actually making a narrative which isn't due in glue, but actually saying, do you know what, we could live better this way, we could live smarter and better. So for example, I think COVID is quite interesting in that regard, because by being stuck at home, we rediscovered our local economy and we started to value things like nature and open space and being able to get out and walk and things like that, you know, and those are things which we, which are available to us all the time, but we're rushing around, traveling and flying and doing all this stuff. And actually, I think slowing down and, you know, valuing what's perhaps on your doorstep more and valuing the people in your life who you were deprived of seeing, you know, all of those things are still there and still really, really important. I think I think we do need a bit of a shift in values that is permanent and so we don't go back to the old ways of doing. And in that, you know, we consumed differently, we consume somethings less and, you know, maybe those are good things in the end of the day, we change the value system that we're living by, which could actually end up being much better for us, better for our well-being, better for our families, better for our social life, etc, etc. Yeah, yes. And what, I think your work seems to me to do is to try and balance those things. So this, you talked about the, you know, the way that sustainability and you talk about it in your kind of environmental technical sense and then talked about the kind of the way that COVID, or for example, can I really do think what COVID did more than anything is just peel back the lid on reality, like you were like, oh crap, this is, this is not good, we are very vulnerable in this kind of way. But there's something, yeah, there's something rather lovely about the way that you've spoken about your work and your thinking, but it's about this kind of situatedness. And in a way, all of your work has already been doing the stuff that you're talking about, which is sort of trying to connect people better to the material reality of their world. Absolutely. And doing it, as you pointed out with your home in intelligent, sumorous ways as well. So it's not po-faced, worthy architecture, but it's an architecture of joy and the life. Well, I think of it as like that. I mean, I think we have been accused of being a bit sort of worthy and holier than now and all the rest of it. But I wouldn't possibly tell you in public. And it's also been kind of accused of being bit tweey and sort of playing at being rural and all of these things. I mean, I can tell you that I haven't bought a vegetable in a shop now for about two months because we are brimming with stuff in our garden and it is just a joy to be able to eat the stuff that you grow. I mean, we're very lucky because we've got some external space. I think of buildings as being in a sense another layer of clothing and that we have to interact with that and understand that we can adjust it. And I think you know, in a way, I think the worst kind of architecture is that which, you know, you have sealed windows, a building management system where you have no control over it and we know that people in offices, for example, women and men, feel very differently about the temperatures coming out through the building management system and who that sort of set for and so on and so on. And in a way, although it might be very low tech, that ability to adjust your and control your own environment through the way that you operate it, I think it's ultimately very, very empowering and it's important and people are very alienated from that as a concept these days. But I mean, if you, you know, lived in a kind of house with sash windows or or casement windows, you can see how, you know, opening it changes the environment and your ability to do that is really important. It's you're engaging with your environment through doing that. And in our house, it's really interesting how, I mean, we live on the first floor in its timber and it's much warmer here in this current weather than downstairs where we've got a concrete slab. It's probably five degrees difference in temperature. So when it gets really warm, we go downstairs and sleep in the bedroom on the ground floor. And actually, when you think about it, that's exactly what used to happen in traditional Iranian houses, which I'm, you know, I personally find very, very interesting because, you know, they have underground rooms called by wind towers and water to humidify the work that the air coming in, making, you know, 45 degrees outside 29 degrees in that space. And so and by moving around the courtyard, as the sun moves and being able to go down and use wind to cool and water to cool, you're able to temper the environment naturally without any power at all through the architecture. And that's what I find really interesting. And I think we're in danger of losing those, that understanding, losing those skills because we just think a piece of kit can do it for us. I'm not saying kit is useless. Of course, it isn't. And it has, you know, of course, you know, the sort of architecture I'm talking about in Iran, traditional houses, they're massive. And we haven't got space for that anymore. But I think the principles still exist. And if that kind of thing could be done through an NVHR, we can change the settings or controls, but still get your fresh air in, which, by the way, is also very good for COVID, you know, why not? You know, we need to employ these settings, but understand how we can interact with the architecture around us to do the things we need it to do and to do them simply. And without, you know, without needing a PhD to understand how to control it individually, you know, that's what we should be aiming at. Brilliant. Thank you very much, Sarah. That was a wonderful. That was an absolute pleasure. Yeah, I really enjoyed speaking to you. I'm really lucky to hear about your work and get the opportunity to dig around in your imagination a little. Well, it's lovely to have the opportunity. Thank you for inviting me. Perfection. Thank you to Sarah for the great conversation and, to be honest, for even dayning to do it. Please see the podcast description for links to Sarah's practice to other talks she's given and essays by her and on her work. Go see Stock Orchard Street when you're next up London. And don't forget to, etc. Thanks for listening. Cheers.