Meet the future builders

Kieran Long
26 Jan 2011

Architecture is a slow-moving business. It takes a long time to become qualified or get a commission and even longer to build a building.

This is why it is the only art form in which the most celebrated exponents are in their sixties and seventies. These old guys (almost always guys, I'm afraid) have worked so long to get there that they don't like to let go of their place at the top of the tree.

But London is a city that nurtures younger talent, with seven architecture schools, a broad and vital cultural scene and plenty of wealthy people who need anything from a back extension to their Georgian terraced house to a new gallery for their collection of etchings. And a new generation of architects is emerging who are interested in more than spending a banker's latest bonus on a vanity project. These young practices are fascinated by what makes London the city it is, rather than in utopian projects to improve it into oblivion.

I arranged this week to meet architects from three such young practices - Aberrant Architecture, Pie Architecture and Adam Khan Architects - at the Gopher Hole, a new gallery in east London dedicated to architecture and design, and the capital's first independent organisation on the subject for years.

The Gopher Hole (so-called because of its location in a Shoreditch basement) is curated by Beatrice Galilee, 28, who has returned to London after spells in Germany and Beijing. "For all of Berlin's qualities," she says, "London has a friction that gives traction to things, that helps thing to happen. Everyone here has a plan, and is looking for someone to execute their plan."

The Gopher Hole has the surprisingly analogue ambitions of being provocative and popular, and was born out of an idea that she and the members of Aberrant Architecture came up with together. Formed in 2007 when the partners Kevin Haley, 29, and David Chambers, 29, graduated from the Royal College of Art, Aberrant was commissioned to rethink the nearby El Paso bar on Old Street, and suggested turning an underused basement room into a space for exhibitions and events.

"The owners of the El Paso bar wanted to do something with the place to increase daytime trade," Chambers says. "We came up with the idea of making the bar a place to work and meet during the day." They turned El Paso into a freelancer's paradise, with wifi, cheap food, quiet places for meetings, as well as touches like lockers (for your laptop, if you need to pop out) and a library of books and newspapers.

Much of the inspiration for this project came from Aberrant's study of London pubs, undertaken last year when the practice became the first winner of the Victoria & Albert Museum's architecture residency. Among the collection, they found the drawings of a monumental pub called the Elephant & Castle in Lambeth, now demolished.

"It was a big, seven-storey pub," Chambers says. "On the ground floor it was split into four different areas with different degrees of privacy, for workers to drink or the saloon where the landlord would entertain people he knew. Upstairs there was a big function room, where anything from political meetings to a dog-walking society meeting would happen. It was like a community centre. There were hotel rooms above. The intensity of use that these pubs had is really interesting to us. The publican almost acted as a host, it was very much a home from home."

Adam Khan, 46, a former builder who founded his practice in 2006 and whose first major project, the New Horizon Youth Centre near King's Cross, opened last year, shares a fascination with London pubs. "I'm very interested in how you get a sense of home in a building. It's not a thing architects are good at talking about. I find it fascinating - how do you make somewhere you can find a place to curl up with a book?"

Khan's London inspirations are less than obvious architectural examples. "I had my students [Khan teaches at Kingston University] researching London pubs last year. In some ways they're not taken seriously enough - they're very sophisticated. They allow you to be on your own, or in a group, you can have a wedding there. There's always a room above the pub for someone to live in, and it has a position on the street. They're pretty wonderful."

He adds that an understanding of pub interiors informed his attempts to make the youth centre a welcoming place -"Do you stick loads of sofas in there? No. You know from pubs that sofas don't work, they're really wasteful of space." Instead, for the King's Cross project, he designed banquette seating and nooks by windows that allow people to spend time in small groups while still feeling part of a larger institution. The rooms do not feel domestic, they are grander than that, but they have an intimacy that is to do with the use of finely tuned furniture and windows and the beautiful joinery of the timber interiors.

In the spring, Khan will complete a much larger project, the Brockholes Visitor Centre in Preston, for a wildlife reserve in Lancashire.

"It's about how you do a really technically complex sustainable building and still find refinement in the architecture. And how you make a little public building have a sense of sociability and conviviality while aiming to be zero carbon, and without descending into eco-bling."

Fran Balaam, 29, and Michael Corr, 35, the partners of Pie Architecture, are based near King's Cross. They also teach at London Metropolitan University. "We have a subtle way of working, we don't want to sanitise and regenerate," says Balaam. "We want to ask what it means to come into these kinds of places."

Their most significant project so far is an extension and refitting of the Seventies buildings of St Joseph's Primary School in Highgate. They designed two new extensions for the school as well as new furniture inside and out. The materials are a beautiful, simple mix of concrete, birch plywood and recycled plastics, avoiding the enforced jollity of many conventional school projects. What marks Pie's work is the care with which they tackle a building for children. "Most of the places we work with have been refurbished a lot of times. What we do is a kind of unpicking. We didn't want to just add another layer."

It is a distinctive feature of these and other young architects in London that they are incurably optimistic about the future. This generation promises to free us from orthodox approaches to rebuilding our city that have tended to make one place much like another. These young practices are interested in the minutiae of London's social life, and the kinds of places that encourage it.

The Gopher Hole's opening show, About a Minute, runs until February 13; forthcoming exhibitions include a survey of the impact of stag and hen parties on European cities. holygopher.com