NMLA Announced as Winners for The Museum of Jesus’ Baptism Competition
February 2026
We are delighted that our practice has been announced as the winner of the Malcolm Reading Consultants international competition The Museum of Jesus’ Baptism at Bethany, Jordan.
Our winning concept impressed the Foundation and the Advisory Panel with “its flair for multi-layered and immersive storytelling that focuses on communicating baptism’s power to offer spiritual renewal and new life.” In scale and form, the proposal answered the brief’s call for a museum that ‘evokes wonder and humility in the visitor and responds sensitively to the site’.
Dr Tharwat Almasalha, Chair of the competition’s Advisory Panel and Chair of the Foundation’s Board, said:
‘We congratulate Níall McLaughlin’s team on their proposal which excels in telling the story of baptism – highlighting its power to offer spiritual renewal and new life.
‘We look forward to celebrating the bimillennial of Christ’s baptism in 2030 with the opening of the new museum which promises to be an inspiration for Jordan, faith communities, and secular visitors worldwide.
‘This proposal responds sensitively to the luminous setting in the wilderness and the adjacent UNESCO site. Though modest in size and form, the design has exceptional resonance: it will be attuned to human and divine connections.
‘Together with the NMLA-led team we’re determined to create a museum that will be a global exemplar and acclaimed as a universal symbol of peace.’
The team commented “We are delighted to receive the news that we are the winners of the competition for the Museum of Jesus’ Baptism at Bethany, Jordan. It is an extraordinary site with a profound history. The brief was beautifully written, and the shortlist was exceptionally strong. We felt honored to be chosen to participate with such an interesting group.
‘The challenge of the design was to find a way to allow the architecture to mediate between a charged landscape and the sacred narratives that arose within it. It demanded a building that could work with allegory. At the same time, the project needed to use local labor, skills, and resources to achieve something with a sense of social responsibility and low carbon expenditure. We now look forward to working with the Foundation to develop the design in dialogue with enthusiastic local and international experts. We relish the opportunity to learn more about this beautiful country.’
Our team is supported by Engicon (Local Consultant); Kim Wilkie Landscape (Landscape Architecture); Nissen Richards Studio (Exhibition Design & Wayfinding); Studio ZNA (Lighting Design); and Arup (Daylight & Shadow Studies).
The Red House
July 2014
A group of us from the office recently went to visit William Morris’ Red House. I was inspired by a picture of a red house on the cover of Peter Davey’s book ‘Arts and Crafts Architecture’ so was slightly disappointed to find that those fine chimneys were the work of Edwin Lutyens and not Philip Webb. It was an interesting trip none the less.
The Red House was designed in 1859 by Philip Webb for William Morris. The two had met in the office of G.E. Street in 1856 during Morris’ brief architectural career. The house can be thought of as a bridge between the ‘Gothic Revival’ as epitomised by the ideals of Pugin and the ‘Arts and Crafts’. 50 years after its construction Lawrence Weaver wrote about The Red House ‘It stands for a new epoch of new ideals and practices. Though the French strain which touched so much of the work of the Gothic Revivalists is not absent, and the Gothic flavour itself is rather marked, every brick in it is a word in the history of modern architecture’.1
The Red House is something of an experiment, built by a young and relatively inexperienced architect, and as such is not a refined piece of architecture. Webb later remarked with reference to The Red House ‘…no architect ought to be allowed to build a house until he was 40’. 2
Despite Webb’s young age the experimental feel of the building is probably more to do with the client. Morris would have been incredibly ambitious and perhaps a little impractical. As our tour guide explained the principal rooms of the building face North to address ‘The Pilgrim’s Way’, an ancient route from Winchester to Canterbury as mentioned in Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’. Our guide took great glee in explaining that this eccentricity led to the building being terribly cold, an example of Morris’ ideas overruling common sense. Peter Davey offers a simpler explanation in that Webb was following the Georgian fashion of the principle rooms facing North, whilst also allowing space for the connection of a future East wing for Morris’ friend Edward Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana.3
To say that the Red House is unrefined, however, is to miss the point of what makes it so significant. It is the physical embodiment of a group of young designers and thinkers who went on to change the face of British art, design and architecture. They were inspired by a nostalgia of a reimagined medieval England, and it was in the past that they found the clues to pave the way for the Arts and Crafts.
This interest in an older England was not unique to Morris as Ian Hislop explains in his recently broadcast BB2 series ‘Ian Hislop’s Olden Days’, which places Morris’ aesthetic interest in the medieval into a broader social and political context. The description of the second episode, ‘Forward into the Past’ is as follows:
Forward into the Past – How the Victorians turned to the Middle Ages to make sense of their era of progress.
‘Ian Hislop travels back to the era of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian Britain. This was a time of some of the greatest progress and modernisation the country had ever seen – and yet, throughout these decades, writers, artists and politicians were trying to make sense of this new world by retreating into a very old world indeed: the Middle Ages.’
The point that Hislop makes is that we take comfort from the cultural signals that remind us of ‘the good old days’ weather they be the idea of chivalry, the Robin Hood politics of ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’ or the truth and beauty inherent in a gothic arch. For the Victorians the golden age was the medieval period so I wonder what it could be for us today.
In architecture we often talk about truth to materials and the expression of a building being honest to its construction. These ideas were central to the thinking of Morris and Webb’s predecessor, A.W.N. Pugin. In his book ‘The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture’ he writes:
‘The two great rules for design are these: 1st, that there should be no features about a building that are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.’
These words seem as relevant today as they were when first written, although our mental picture on reading them may be somewhat different. Perhaps Pugin’s time and the generation that followed could be thought of as an architectural golden age. In architecture school the Victorian period is an interesting piece of history but not relevant to modern design, but might it be ok to take some inspiration from these great designers?
The idea of any given moment in time looking back to a golden age reminds me of the plot of Woody Allen’s film ‘Midnight in Paris’ which Wikipedia notes ‘The movie explores themes of nostalgia and modernism’
Gil Pender travels back to his Golden age, 1920’s Paris where he socialises with the likes of Hemmingway and falls in love with the beautiful Adriana. All’s well until they are transported back to Adriana’s golden age, the 1890s Belle Époque and Pender realises that a golden age can only ever exist in the past.
If time travel were possible we would only ever be chasing rainbows.
When we build in an historic environment or we are looking to create a sense of place we turn to local materials and traditional construction techniques. These offer us a connection with the past that is important for reasons that I can’t begin to explain but which I acknowledge as being real and significant.
It seems to be becoming increasingly acceptable within contemporary architecture to address issues of nostalgia and modernism but our recent brush with post-modernism has made us cautious in our approach. As we venture once more in this direction we would do well to remember the lessons of Pugin, Allen and Hislop.
1. Weaver, Lawrence Small Country Houses of Today, First Series, Country Life, London, nd, p180.
2. Jack, George ‘An appreciation of Philip Webb’, The Architectural Review, Vol XXXVIII, 1915, p3.
3. Davey, Peter Arts and Crafts Architecture, Phaidon, 2010, p40.
Tom studied at the University of Manchester where he received a BA (Hons) and a diploma with Distinction at the Glasgow School of Art. He won the Royal Scottish Academy Student Prize for Architecture in 2006 as well as the Glasgow City Council Silver Medal, Glasgow School of Art Chairman’s Medal and Glasgow Institute of Architects’ Parchment. Between 2006 and 2013 he worked for Duggan Morris Architects and Rick Mather Architects. Tom joined Niall McLaughlin in 2014 and has been working on a private house in Hampshire and is currently running the Jesus College project for the master plan and first phase of development to add research, social, academic and residential accommodation to the College facilities.