STUDIO ANDREW TODD

Our core activity is the design and delivery of buildings, scenographies, installations, systems, urban spaces, landscapes and interior environments for our clients (who range from regional and municipal governments to major corporations, private bodies and individuals).

 

Our projects -built and unbuilt- reflect twenty years’ experience in sectors such as the performing arts, housing, the visual arts, commerce, education, gastronomy and civic space -both living and urban. We work best with deeply questioning clients who expect a completely fresh approach to each project. Our greatest satisfaction comes from moments of collaborative revelation and constructive insight resulting in original but seemingly inevitable synthesis.

 

Our work on building is inseparable from -and profoundly supported by- our parallel actions as thinkers and assemblers.

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All making is both solid and social: life requires a framework; objects require a social purpose; it’s impossible to do one without implicating the other. An important part of our practice involves physical actions of bringing together. We bring together materials, we bring together people. Usually we do both at the same time.

 

Direct actions nourish our work on buildings, and vice versa. These actions include prototyping building elements, making installations, hardware and furniture, and organising gatherings like seminars, conferences and concerts.

 

Assembling broadens and deepens our knowledge. By encountering others, we engage empathy and reconsider how we fit it to the world. By making materials fit, we develop embodied knowledge of economy of means, of effectiveness, of resolution, of resilience.

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Buildings should speak for themselves. That said, architecture is a socio-political profession engaging vast resources, occupying common space that has microcosmic and macrocosmic scales. We should therefore be clear and responsible about the thinking behind our designs.

 

Our motivations should be made manifest, both as regards our own actions and also the past we inherit and take forward for a short time. We owe a particular clarity towards the wounded world we inevitably deplete, revivify and restructure through our buildings.

 

Our practice is critical, in the sense that we reflect a great deal about what we and others do. This goes beyond marketing our own acts, and engages ‘practical criticism’ of our ancestors and peers, lobbying for change, raising awareness of broad subjects like theatre space and biomaterials.

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