CREATIVE INITIATIVE + STUDIO EGRET WEST • TALK

How do you approach a large scale project like Koza Park, the competition housing project in Istanbul?

I have to say it has not really come to anything which is a bit disappointing. As we are a fusion of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture, it means that the studio has work across all scales, so we can be working on an individual house right the way up to ten thousand houses. And we can be working on a really small scale community building all the way up to a super stacked really high density very tricky complex mixed used building and we can be working on a small infill site all the way up to a huge either brown filled or indeed a green filled site. So, because of that we offer what we refer to as strategy with specificity and specificity with strategy, two funny words but two really key words to our practice which means that often when we’re appointed to just a building we always look way beyond the site before determining the future of the building. So we’re not architects that plop design ideas out of the air onto the site, and you buy an icon. So we definitely don’t fit into the “starchitect mold” of you know what you’re going to get. We genuinely start with a very open brief as to discover what a project can be. But we always go bigger and quite often a lot bigger than the site we’ve been given, whether it’s a city district or a particular plot and then we try to get to know the site and its story really well, and partially that’s to do with its history and the hidden layers that we may not be able to see on the surface now, it’s very important to us. Its narrative, its story, and the story the site wants to tell us. If one sees that as the preface, or the first few chapters of the story of the architecture or the design, we then think of the new story the new chapters the next chapters as the sphere in which were working today and so that’s the discussion with what the clients, politicians want what the other stake holders want what the community desires and so were forging all of those stories and layers together but of course what we aspire to as designers too, we see those as the new chapters for the site and then we gently fuse them together, which means that all of our projects are quite particular and very specific which means we don’t actually have a house style, there is no house style. Literally every single project can turn into what it needs to become. So were designing buildings that are very strong contemporary industrial looking things in a project called the old vinyl factory where every single building has its name again and it has a second chance to be called what it should and always has been. And it’s got such a different aesthetic to our project in Cambridge where we’re designing a community stadium and it’s got a different aesthetic and feel to a project in Bromley, a hotel and conference centre and public realm so it’s a process that’s full of surprises.

When you say that there’s a story that fuses together your architecture, could we say, what does your culture, being British, add to a project in say, Istanbul or another part of the world because it’s a very different history and landscape. Do you add from yourself or do you just take from the site, landscape, the geography?

I think it’s impossible not to add something from yourself. But I think strangely the British culture is very eclectic and in a sense there is not a British culture. The British culture is so