Places are not experienced in isolation. When we move between buildings, along streets, or dwell in public spaces, the experience is synthesised into a single day or a journey. Yet extant boundaries within architectural thinking risk limiting intervention to the bare minimum. Even the manner in which a building is experienced isn’t readily understood, since we work and live from the inside-out, yet too often design is preoccupied with outdated rules of external appearance. 

Boundaries are a product of categorisation, serving the narrow purpose of easy identification. They limit creative thought and hinder action and once they are gone, you question why they existed for so long. 

When we first started working from a small office in Shoreditch in 1997, we embraced the area’s creative freedom. We understood that to treat a building as four solid walls belies its true potential and instead looked to community, art, fashion and interior design. Where existing architects provided designs strictly to brief, we cultivated an agency approach that clients quickly embraced. 

This approach resulted in us becoming early advocates for the imaginative reuse of buildings. Long before embodied carbon was a common term, we were already focused on avoiding wasteful clearance and instead understanding, retaining and enhancing what already worked. 

27 years later, our approach has found its maturation in exemplar schemes that demonstrate agility between different disciplines. In Canary Wharf, the transformation of an austere first-generation building into YY London - a new building that prioritises outdoor space, tenant wellbeing, an enlivened public realm and improved environmental performance - serves as the first story in the next chapter of Canary Wharf. 

The creation of new retail and restaurant units along three elevations and an extensive triple-height entrance lobby enables the building to gesture outwards. External terraces on every floor reach an apex at roof level with a large communal roof terrace and pavilion that is for the entire building, rather than a single tenant. The success of the retrofit has given confidence to the Estate to undertake new work to improve the public realm, typified by a new green spine that will add new parks, gardens, waterside access, performance spaces, bridges, boardwalks and pontoons across the Estate. The confidence and belief that such a transformation was possible has spread to the retrofit of other neighbouring buildings.

But size isn’t a requirement to think broadly. At Ice Factory, the refurbishment and extension of an awkward, former industrial building that is nearly 200 years old has created workspace, retail and a restaurant over five floors. The scheme serves as the next chapter in the creation of Eccleston Yards, the first phase of which we completed in 2018. Here, our urban vision for a former car park has challenged perceptions of Belgravia and developed an open public space surrounded by workspace, studios, and retail units tailored to independent businesses, entrepreneurs and creative talent. 

Creating spaces that trigger an emotive and cognitive experience often requires close collaboration with many makers. Our architecture and interior design teams collaborate across studios and projects, and we have historically worked with galleries, artists, and collectors to produce physical artworks for many spaces - including unique commissions by emerging artists - that respond to a space for major sculptural installations that work around existing structures. In Shoreditch, we established Shoreditch Arts Club as our hometown glory: a fusion of architecture, art and interior design that is intended to augment the area’s defiant artistic and cultural identity within a club for work and play that is open day and night. The project is a manifestation of thinking broadly about design and has repurposed a former loading bay into a new club that celebrates young creative talent and looks to the next generation of artists.The space has welcomed groups from our local communities of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, alongside those within the built environment and art communities. It has become a space to debate, share thought and provide overlap between otherwise very separate communities. 

The success of thinking beyond boundaries has been recognised beyond borders in Europe, where we have been busy for over a decade. The redevelopment of Tànger 66 in Barcelona was the first LEED Platinum building in the city and provided a landmark building to establish the 22@ district as a revitalised urban district popular with tech firms. We then did the same in Madrid, where Ancora 40 repurposed a large building and adjacent bare plot adjacent to the central railway station, helping to create a sustainable and vibrant office hub. In both cases, we uncovered hidden opportunities that other architects had missed in their knock-down new-build proposals. We maximised the development potential of the buildings whilst ensuring they worked with their immediate surroundings. The high demand for design that thinks beyond boundaries is reflected in our new Madrid office, serving as a base for our European work. 

Looking ahead, we continue to thrive cross-sector. We are progressing an interior design driven technical hub in Bristol and creating a new 82-room boutique hotel on Park Lane, two notable projects amongst other schemes that marry interior design with architecture: BGY ID with Buckley Gray Yeoman. Both studios know that all buildings are more than skin deep and are defined by their internal appearance: where we dwell and appropriate the space around us. 

The next step is to continue to spread the gospel and challenge outdated modes of practice. We are already proud to collaborate with consultants who share our ambition for creative reinvention and the design teams we lead continue to keep pushing what we can achieve and how we collectively think. Paired with the ambition and support of our clients, we are looking ahead to a new era of adaptation that can transform and evolve all manner of spaces.