OEB Architects create work of imagination and social good through dialogue, design and making. According to them, people bring OEB on board as knowledgeable and pragmatic partners for arts centres, community spaces, rural estates, city-centre regeneration and individual homes. The practice was formed in 2018 and is based in East London.
Their work asks how to be ethically-minded and articulate whatever the use or scale, and how to find delight in the ways that materials of both economy and ecology might perform.
The practice prioritises a simple approach to sustainability that maximises insulation, minimises embodied energy and is easily adaptable. The practice is all-tech - some high but mostly low, looking for construction that makes sense, and makes a sensibility. OEB likes nature and artifice, and aims to be careful with both.
What’s the most exciting project you’ve got coming up and why?
We are really excited to be moving forward with our work at the Wysing Arts Centre, outside Cambridge. We won the open competition for the project in 2020, after establishing the practice two years earlier. Awarding the project to a relatively new firm demonstrated the trust and support given to creatives that is at the core of Wysing’s approach.
Over the past four years the impact of Covid has meant the project has developed along a slower path, with smaller, more targeted interventions across the site to respond to different requirements and funding opportunities.
While we often work very quickly on relatively tight timescales, we have found it very rewarding to maintain this longer contact with a client, allowing a project to develop slowly. We have used this new pace to understand in more detail how they operate and to be there to advise how best their existing buildings can meet their changing requirements. We are now preparing the Stage 4 information for amendments to the reception building, an accessible live-work unit and landscaping across the site.
Being the longest project in the office, seeing this progress to site will be very exciting.
As well as this we have recently taken our first infrastructure project to planning and will be great to see how this progresses in a prominent location in East London. Plus we are keen to build further on our contextual yet imaginative housing projects with Arrant Land.
Where do you look for inspiration?
We enjoy developing designs through a confluence of context, construction, and some thing else - an idea that might come from another place, or outside architecture altogether. We start conversations with clients asking them what they like, what they are drawn to, what moments are held in their memory- making it clear that these don’t need to be other buildings. We then use this conversation to try to make something that is the both responsive to its surroundings and at the same time in some way unique.
In a recently completed project in Lewisham, we were really excited by our wonderful clients’ desire to bring something of the atmosphere of the colonnades and palazzos of the Italian renaissance to a roof extension in South London. We developed a form that concentrated the characteristics and memories of columns and loggias into two symmetrical bays containing the bedroom and bathroom, with a swooping zinc roof over the stairs linking the two.
It’s our view that design in sensitive settings doesn’t have to be boringly deferential to be appropriate.
Context is a fixed entity, and there is a lot of weirdness in the existing already. Our project in Whitstable with Arrant Land sought to investigate some of the oddness of seaside suburbia into a very buildable, sustainable and customisable house typology.
We aim to create legible, honest architecture that isn’t afraid to have conversations with context or add contemporary artifice where it expresses a particular spirit and brings joy to the environment.
We are also interested in how the once exciting references we had as students are rarely mentioned now, and this seemingly arbitrary drop in value is fascinating - We are particularly interested in looking at buildings from the 1980s onwards with a historical eye, as this is the context that we are increasingly working with. We like to investigate what architectural references inspired these buildings, what were the avant garde ideas of the time, what ‘new’ materials and technologies did did these buildings employ.
Our forthcoming water source heat pump building has elements that cast a glance back to the Superdutch era of the early 2000s, as well as high tech, but in combination with a subtle rhythm of timber cladding that offers a more sensitive and demure contemporary approach.
What do you think is the most important issue for architects to focus on right now, and what are you doing as a practice to tackle it?
Prioritising the re-use of buildings over demolition is important for us. The dramatic saving in embodied energy is a clear justification for this, and the fact that all renovation is not equally rated with new build for VAT clearly influences decision making. Prioritising re-use coupled with the specification of natural and low-carbon materials is crucial if the profession is to do its bit in addressing the climate crisis, and it is clear that these things need to be regulated if they are to become widely used rather than specialist choices.
For instance introducing not just regulation of energy in the form embodied carbon, but also introducing limits on the amount of petroleum and plastic based products that can be used not just for their energy consumption but due to their capacity as pollutants.
This is a continual learning process for us as a practice as the impacts and shortcomings of materials and technologies becomes clear. Materials that were once lauded need to be reassessed, such as low-VOC water based paints, for example, that are now shown to be significant contributors to micro-plastics in the environment.
We also feel there is more to promoting re-use than the clear sustainability benefits. We are fortunate in the UK to have a richly varied built environment, in many cases one that has slowly developed over centuries. It is a physical record of our combined histories, cultures and ideas. A once exclusive Victorian villa may sit cheek by jowl with a small post-war block of flats, both at some point may have had the ground floors converted to commercial and maybe now back to residential. This variety only exists by maintaining what is already there and adapting things to suit a new use.
A walk down streets such as Rye Lane in Peckham can demonstrate just how complex and layered our cities can be.
On the one hand we feel there is a real risk that demolition slowly erodes this variety. A handful of major historical buildings are protected, however it is the gradual removal of what might be seen as ‘lower-quality’ architecture that is a concern for us for both environmental and cultural reasons. Often these marginal examples still contain good ideas or moments of delight that will not be replaced, as well as potentially being meaningful for people who use them or pass by them each day.
This is especially the case with post-war buildings, where state or municipal built projects are evidence of the social ambition of that era. It is true that many of these structures need care and attention, but an avoidance of maintenance should not be an excuse to have them pulled down.
On the other hand we feel that the process of adaptation and reuse also offers us in each instance an opportunity as a society to evaluate and gain understanding of the less positive historic and economic forces that have shaped our places for better or worse.
Engaging critically with this history offers us potentially transformative ways to imagine how to work in historic contexts today.
Our recent runner-up entry to The Davidson Prize looked at this issue of reusing marginal post-war buildings, in this instance a single storey parade of shops in Harlow, locally called a ‘hatch’. This typology can be found in most other post war new-towns: Corner shops for urban layouts that no longer have traditional corners. These are the kind of buildings that typically wouldn’t be thought twice about being demolished to make way for new development - low rise, fairly low quality, fairly low value, but still with ideas, nuanced contextually and the potential to be energised. Plus of course a lot of embodied energy.
Our proposal learnt from African compound housing typologies to convert the garages behind the shops into a communal courtyard, around which new flexible living spaces are grouped. The existing shops are retained with some units converted into shared facilities for the housing and wider community: a large communal kitchen doubles as a cookery school, the shared utility room doubles as a launderette.
What wider cultural shift do you think will improve the built environment, and what can architects do to encourage this?
We feel the acceptance that buildings need to be maintained will result in a significant improvement to the built environment. To re-use our existing buildings means we will need to look after what we have already built.
We think this is a wider issue than just the pragmatics of maintenance, it is a cultural problem: there is a finish and forget mentality.
For too long we have been seduced by materials that promised to be ‘maintenance free’ and that this equates to progress. In reality, these materials are often simply plastics or coated in plastics. Their shiny coating extending maintenance cycles long enough to become divorced from how a building is owned and occupied, always left to be someone else’s problem until it is too late. A slow development of a pleasing patina has been replaced with peeling surfaces, condensation and rot.
Regular maintenance also offers the possibility for people to connect more with each other and the buildings they inhabit. We worked with Nana Biamah-Ofosu from YAA Projects on the Harlow Re-new Town project, and it was fascinating to hear her description of the culture of self-build and self-maintenance in some communities in Northern Ghana.
In our proposals we included the idea of an annual maintenance festival, and also developed alternative ideas about how buildings might be procured and maintained, for instance with a Community Building Company, where local residents can join to be trained up and take part in design, construction and maintenance activities within and organised structure managed by experienced construction professionals and trades. The aim was to empower residents who are often disenfranchised from being able to repair their homes through systems of landlord consent, ownership, and cost burden.
We tried this on a micro scale with locals from Harlow helping to paint our competition model, choosing what pattern to make from the tins of left over paint we had gathered, talking about the site and the proposal as we painted. This simple activity worked as a bridge between the scheme and the locals.
Maintenance should not just be accepted, but celebrated.
What do you think architecture practices need most support with during this recession?
Answering these questions we have described a practice of maintenance in the broadest terms - to maintain relationships with clients, to maintain the richness of the built environment, and to maintain the buildings themselves.
This is not a quick fix, as a slower understanding of how buildings need to be adapted and shaped is a more complex, labour intensive process, requiring more thinking upfront, more challenging of preconceived ideas, more convincing of clients.
In times of hardship we need support to ensure that these slower processes, technologies, material choices and challenging of ideas are still economically viable. That they are not cast aside for cheap, petrochemical sponsored, quick-fix solutions.
The crisis of affordability of housing and living standards is often spoken about as if it only affects a narrow portion of society, but a large proportion of architectural workers earn less than median income, and these issues affect a lot of us, particularly those from less advantaged backgrounds without familial wealth.
While action on a wider political level is required to address these problems, such as the upcoming ban on no fault evictions (which should have a slowing effect on the inflation of property prices) we believe action on procurement reform is essential to open up fluidity in the profession. This will allow small practices that want to to develop and grow, share in the opportunities available, and bring new ideas to the table.
We are all familiar within minimum turnover, PI levels wildly over the level of the project budget, and completed projects of the same type being qualifying factors for tenders. but how about maximum thresholds for practices on projects of an appropriate scale?
The Flemish competition system together with the Bouwmeester model also gets mentioned frequently, and we feel this emphasis on innovation, quality, and support of engaged young practices, would be of huge benefit here - the quality and ambition of projects and range of practices in Belgium is evidence of this.
For more information about this practice and their work, visit the OEB Architects website or follow @oebarchitects on Instagram.
