New-works believe in a new way of working rooted in greater specialism, collaboration, and well-being.
They see multiple benefits to this way of working for themselves, their collaborators, and their clients.
Before New-works, co-founders Tom Lewith and Doug Hodgson founded and ran TDO for 14 years.
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?
The climate crisis is a generational challenge facing all of us. It demands that we change how we design and the materials we use to build with. We took some fundamental decisions when we founded New-works that enable us to work differently.
The need to move away from design-as-usual to tackle the climate crisis is hard to meet when you must to rely on repeating previous design processes to handle the breadth of output needed for all-services architecture on a marginal fee.
We believe we can all have the greatest impact by focusing on our unique selling points, passions, and skills; and the opportunity for collaboration. For us that is the earlier stages of projects: first concepts to detail design, embracing the opportunities of retrofit and MMC.
We believe that by specialising in what we are each passionate about, and collaborating, that we can make space to be creative and invest in the R&D we need to meaningfully address the climate crisis.
At New-works we are doing this by working with executive architects and other specialists throughout our projects. We specialise in leading designs from first concepts to detailed design, before exchanging the lead with our delivery collaborators while we stay at our clients’ side through construction.
Our working day is structured to foster creativity. The morning is for deep work, and the afternoon for correspondence. An hour before the start and after the end of the day is dedicated to our mental and physical wellbeing.
What is your advice to future architecture generations?
The world is moving at an incredible pace, with much change still to come. It is both exciting and daunting. The advent of AI in particular will bring about fundamentally new ways of working.
If we look back to the late 1990’s, when we were joining a future generation of architects, the world as it is now would have been so hard to accurately predict. Before the 2000’s jobs and their descriptions were largely static from one generation to the next.
It is equally hard to predict with any certainty where the profession will be 20 or 30 years from now. A 2017 report from Dell and Institute for the Future famously predicted 85% of the jobs in 2030 were yet to exist.
In this context the advice we would give reflects the change we have recently made in founding New-works: work out what exactly you are passionate about and focus on doing that. What that translates into as a future job title is arguably less important.
Focusing on what you want to do - rather than what you want to be - can ensure you remain relevant, agile, and passionate.
What do you feel needs to change about the profession and what are you doing to address it?
We believe there is a mental health and wellbeing problem in architecture. Long hours, low pay, high risk and stress levels, and sometimes confrontational relationships on site contribute to this.
We also feel that the mental stretch architects perform, by leading design teams over seven work stages, is significant and we believe that through collaboration we can address this. At New-works our belief is that working with delivery focused practices as a team throughout the lifespan of a project allows us to each contribute where we are strongest, providing support and quality assurance throughout the process.
We believe the scope of an architect’s role is now so broad and requires such varied skill sets that it is best carried out as a collaboration of specialists. By working as a team throughout, consistent responsibility can be offered in the Principal Designer role by the delivery practice, and the concept designer remains answerable for their design far beyond the early stages by remaining involved through construction.
Aside from the QA benefits we see in the collaboration, we also believe this provides mental health benefits by not over-stretching individuals. It has also allowed us to restructure the working day: we have shortened our days to 10am to 5pm with dedicated time for physical and mental wellbeing.
How do you incorporate environmental and social sustainability into your work?
Our design work always starts with developing an understanding of the site’s context through very detailed drawings; which start as shaded diagrammatic drawings, and build to detailed readings of the site and its surroundings.
For our Great Suffolk Yard project, this is all we presented at the first pre-application. We discussed the importance of different buildings on the site and its physical and social history without tabling any proposals. This approach allows us to build a relationship with the buildings and an understanding of how they contribute to the background of the lives of the community around them.
The project, now complete, developed from this analysis as a retrofit, adaption, and extension of the existing buildings around the existing work-a-day yard - itself a typology specific to Southwark. The loose fit, adaptable scheme provides the same saleable area as the preceding demolition and new build proposals by others, without the loss of significant embodied carbon and shared histories on the site.
Our Low Line arches projects provide facilities for the benefit of local communities and businesses in unused and underused arches along the Victorian railway viaduct between London Bridge and Bermondsey.
By contrast to conventional arch fit outs, we sought to retain the rough, characterful, layered histories of the arches and their relationship to the streetscape. Where it is not required, we stripped off the waterproofing to reveal the incredible hand-built brick vaults supporting the railway. Our interventions are pulled away from the brickwork and free-standing. They can be demounted, removed, and installed in new arches to minimise their environmental impact.
Our proposals were developed through friendly critical feedback from the Friends of the Low Line, the GLA, and the BIDs. The arches continue to provide the backdrop to community life they provided before our proposals were built. The uses of the arches include a bike hub, last mile delivery logistics centre, urban gardener facilities, workspace, and flexible community space (which has been used for classes, exhibitions, and a polling station for the general election among many other uses).
Both projects demonstrate how we incorporate environmental and social sustainability into our work: taking a retrofit approach to maintain and build on the shared social histories, with a loose fit, adaptable design to ensure long term viability.
What’s the most exciting project you’ve got coming up and why?
We have been working as one of 12 architects with Human Nature on their groundbreaking Phoenix project in Lewes, which is a scheme that enthusiastically takes on so much that we must address as an industry. It will be the UK’s largest timber neighbourhood and seeks to turn the imperatives of the climate and natural emergencies into opportunities for better design, placemaking, and healthier living.
It is a project we were delighted to see consented at committee earlier this year. It has the potential to demonstrate how we can significantly change what and how our industry goes about building communities and places.
It is exciting to us for these reasons, but also because the ambitions of the client and project encapsulate so much about why we set up New-works: making deliberate changes and space to proactively foster creativity and wellbeing.
