ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES
NOVEMBER 2020
Acknowledging that architecture is a corpus of inherited ideas, Alternative Histories invited more than 80 contemporary practices in the UK and Europe to imagine an exchange with architects from the past. Each office was assigned a different drawing from the collection of Drawing Matter. The architects were then tasked with making a model that not only responded to what they saw, but envisioned an alternative future for the original drawing while adhering to the constraints of the project
Our practice was given Basil Spence’s sketch for the enlargement of the Houses of Parliament. To view our response to this project please visit the Drawing Matter website here.
NIALL MCLAUGHLIN WRITES LA ARTICLE FOR ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW
SEPTEMBER 2013
Niall McLaughlin has written an article for the Architectural Review, entitled ‘Street Life: Michael Maltzan’s Social Housing in Los Angeles’. The piece examines the history of the infamous area of LA known as Skid Row and three housing projects by the practice Michael Maltzan Architecture for this fractured part of the city. The piece draws out common themes between the projects, which are all low-cost accommodation for the previously homeless, exploring the successful spatial relationships between the private space of the individual rooms, the areas of common sheltered space and the public realm of the street.
“The formal virtuosity of each composition is Maltzan’s own special skill and they suggest that high architecture can give pleasure and dignity to all of us….I hope that the different spatial experiments, linking and articulating pavement, common sheltered space and private rooms, will become subjects for further reflection and analysis. It speaks of our common need to situate ourselves and participate in public life.” NM