Without Prejudice.
I think I’m coming to the end.
It’s starting to feel like time to change direction.
I’ve designed enough buildings. Just over one a week for the past twenty years. Alongside that, I’ve been teaching continuously.
Some are small, some big. Mostly houses, but also adventure playgrounds, coffee shops, offices and industrial buildings. All on my own. Not all built — but well over half have involved the trowels, shovels and nail guns of builders.
So as this week draws to a close — having signed off four finished builds, drawn multiple cross sections, and broken down a cost estimate with a builder to get it close to budget — I’m out of energy. And I’ve decided that this year is the last at this pace.
The last of doing it like this.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been doing virtual video calls. I take the caller’s floor plans, listen to how they’re stuck, and usually come up with something that clarifies their thinking. Gives them options. Slows them down. Finds a direction.
“An impressive format,” as one recent caller put it.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to push this to the extreme. I held what I called a Design Marathon — ten of these fifty-minute calls back to back, from lunchtime to bedtime. Houses all over the country: Merseyside to Wimbledon via Dumbarton.
It encompassed the best bits of teaching — sitting down for a day with individual students, helping them think through a design problem — combined with the compressed application of experience gained across more than a thousand projects.
This isn’t a knee-jerk decision. I felt something similar last year. In July, I announced privately that I’d retired. I didn’t really know what I meant at the time. It lasted two months. But it was the beginning of a rethink.
I could, of course, just do fewer projects. And this change doesn’t mean I’ll stop seeing work through entirely. But it probably means five projects a year, not fifty.
What I really enjoy is helping people think clearly about their homes. It’s a form of teaching, and I’d like to find a way to distil this thinking into something homeowners can apply themselves—not to replace architects, but to unstick people at the start.
Empowerment, confidence, and freedom are the best values you can instil in anyone. Finding my own direction and doing my own thing for twenty years feels like something worth trying to share.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
A proper building with shipping containers. One of the adventure playgrounds I designed featured a building made of 40-foot shipping containers, including one that stood on its end to make a play tower. It got built, but the Local Authority couldn’t understand the shipping container thing. So, its there today, a cavity wall building precisely the size of shipping boxes. Cheaper, they said. It wasn’t. Less risky, they meant.
3D printing an entire building on site.
Main Image credit: Somewhere between where I’ve been and what comes next. (ChatGPT)
