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Visited the yin and yang of architecture yesterday, in the form of the World's largest (HOK), famous for the Barclay's tower in Canary Wharf and Grosvenor Place, winner of the British Council of Office's best of the best in 2001, and Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, known for introducing straw bale houses into the mainstream. The firm with 2000+ employees worldwide said it was a pioneer of sustainability and gave me a 500 page book on sustainable design (second edition) while Sarah's firm, with about eight people barely mentioned the topic but embody it. It is surely a peculiarity of the term which forms half of my job title that two such different organisations can lay claim to it.
Despite the fame of her Straw Bale House, Sarah claims that it has bought her little or no work. The public sector and social projects she tends to bid on want a safe pair of hands to get the next job done, she says. And she's more likely to get a commission for a type of building she has just done than for something that she would like to explore.
She showed me designs for a couple of new schools the practice was doing in Richmond and Yorkshire and I said I couldn't help noticing that they seemed to recall some of the Modernist school designs by people like Alison and Peter Smithson such as Hunstanton, particularly in the reds and the greens chosen for some of the facades. Sarah said this was her dirty secret and fished out a book called, 'Towards a Social Architecture: The Role of School Building in Post-War England.' Which she said was a marvellous book. "There was nothing wrong with those schools. The problem was the maintenance."
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