Our work explores memory and identity in architecture and their contribution to our nation’s cultural landscape and heritage.

Memory is a palimpsest of past experiences, and in the case of architecture, of places visited, buildings known, surfaces brushed up against, images on a screen, paragraphs in a book, an object played with, a wall touched, a room slept in. All these things are woven together by our subconscious in a tapestry of texture and form.

Identity is an edifice we construct in order to filter such a richly embroidered tapestry into a meaningful and comprehensible whole and through which we navigate our relationship to the built environment and the world around us. It is to memory that we owe a sense of identity. And it is to a sense of identity that we owe feelings of comfort, belonging, ritual and social communion. These feelings of belonging are essential in ensuring society provides spaces where many individuals can seek out shared identities. Shared identity is the cultural landscape that oils our relationships with each other and to society at large.

We believe that architecture needs to connect to both individual and collective memory to provide meaningful spaces for the ritual of daily life to flourish. Memory has a habit of distorting reality and the creative latitude that this distortion allows is crucial in nourishing a living and dynamic cultural landscape rather than a dead and static one. Memory is not a linear one-dimensional process and is, moreover, by its nature democratic and pluralist. It traverses many experiences and dogmas and progresses in extraordinary and mystical ways.

We make buildings that attempt to nurture individual and collective memory, believing that memory is an important weapon in resisting the increasing fragmentation and commercialisation of space. We are weavers of the past into our work but in a purposefully distorted way. We do not do this by a pastiche of tradition, but by creatively juxtaposing contrasting images from variegated sources, to produce - ‘an exquisite corpse’ if you will, or – a richly textured and dynamic architectural tapestry of traditional and contemporary forms and materials.

We do this both because we hope that our various communities will respond with a renewed love for the power of architecture to contain their needs as well as excite their passions and because they will see that buildings can be infused with the spirit that makes the cultural fabric of our society so special and so necessary.