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Space Invaders: Emerging UK Architecture

by John McGee

Yokohama International Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects (2002)
(Images courtesy of TN Probe and the architects)

Architecture is traditionally an old man’s game. “Space Invaders,” a traveling exhibition of 15 design firms organized by the British Council, shows that some of the best contemporary British architects are not old (these are 30-44), traditional (Softroom designed an apartment shaped like a Swiss-army knife, with rooms that fold out), or necessarily men (muf is a group of seven women). And some of the firms are not even based in the UK. dECOi’s sensual technology comes out of Paris, Klein Dytham architecture’s (KDa) shiny, curvy fluff from here in Tokyo. 

In diverse, vibrant “Space Invaders” Britain, entrepreneurial young architects forgo long apprenticeships in the local Architecture-is-Eternal establishment, preferring to organize interdisciplinary groups of designers, artists, engineers and other creatives to work on projects that interest them. Many are short term. Some aren’t even buildings. Muf helped develop a skateboard and BMX park on reclaimed land. General Lighting and Power makes music videos and advertisements. 

Besides youth and a predilection for mixing upper and lower-case initials in their names, what connects the firms? Lucy Bullivant, one of the exhibition’s two curators, says, “We were not necessarily looking for a ‘style’ of practice, but for a conceptual focus.” Most firms employ new strategies and new materials, fusing theory and practice in a nimble approach that finds cost-effective, flexible and customizable solutions to specific, immediate problems. “Their designs are eminently practical and highly conceptual,” says Bullivant. Pedro Gadanho, the other curator, sees elements of collage and DIY, calling the projects “situation specific rather than site specific.” 

Urban Salon’s Skyscape, a temporary cinema complex in London (2000)

Among the rhetoric and abstractions typical of cutting-edge architecture, Urban Salon’s Alex Mowat offers some tangibles. Time is a key consideration in everything the firm makes. “Architects traditionally never think of their building’s obsolescence,” he says. “We try to build flux in.” Because their enormous Skyscape cinema complex was only going to be up for one year, they opted against manufacturing a metal skeleton and instead strung a tensile fabric roof over rented rock concert scaffolding. “It was phenomenally cheap,” says Mowat. And environmentally friendly—they recycled the exterior cladding, using it in another temporary structure, an office building with a life span of five years. They’ve numbered all of the building’s structural elements so that, when its time is up, they can disassemble it, check the beams for stress fractures and other wear and tear, then re-use the materials in other projects. 

Urban Design also created the exhibition’s freestanding boxes on stilts, laid out here in diagonal, hedge-like rows. Each architectural group collaborated with Urban Design to customize their individual box with project videos, photos, drawings and other information. (The show also includes two videos, one of interviews with the designers in venues like the Dutch train system, the other a series of CG films exploring the sensual properties of design software and virtual environments.) 

dRMM’s Moshi Moshi restaurant,
Brighton (2001)  

After visiting the exhibition, those who believe in the Steen Eiler Rasmussen quote printed on Bullivant’s business card—“It is not enough to see architecture; you must experience it”—should visit local examples of work by a couple of these architect groups. KDa’s Laforet front entrance redesign is just down the street in Harajuku. Foreign Office Architects’ (FOA) recently opened Yokohama International Port Terminal is a bit farther away, but symbolic of the grand success some of these firms can produce when given the opportunity.

This exhibition was held Mar-Apr 2003 at TN Probe in Kita-Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan.

©2007 John McGee

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