Designing and Making

The office bears the trace of other times and places. As I experienced it in 2014, the room contained ten architects, then involved in the construction of four buildings, with numerous other design projects at various stages of completion. When I visited two years previously, there were still only six architects, working in an office in the house of Tomas’s codirector, Tom, in an extension he had himself designed. The practice had moved there a couple of years before, having outgrown an adapted garden shed at the end of Tomas’s rented cottage. Freezing in winter and too hot in summer, the shed was where they first set up office and where they subsequently took on their first employee. These details are themselves part of a story I hear recounted on a number of occasions. They are factually correct but convey a narrative truth beyond this: of sacrifice, and of rapid change from humble beginnings that is a source collective pride. Alongside this are ambivalences, anxieties that the progress won through hard work has nonetheless been accompanied by changes about which they are more ambivalent....