We both worked on Antony Gormley’s studio when we were at DCA. In essence, we had two mentors: David (Chipperfield) and Antony (Gormley). From them, we learnt a way of designing buildings through an intense interest in physical things. We stay close to the physicality of things at all stages of the design process. If you walk around our studio, you’ll see lots of models and drawings on pin-up walls. We have design reviews daily. We bring lots of different voices into the studio to ask different questions. We are nomadic in where we take commissions, but London is the city we’ve chosen to base our studio and families. The city brings lots of commercial and creative forces.

Andy and I started doing competitions, designing and experimenting together from an early stage. What we’ve tried to do is extend a cultural practice of interrogating ideas. Working for Design Museum Gent in Belgium is a good example of how we work together. It’s a project steeped in collaborations. We’ve established a culture and environment of many voices, all bringing expertise from inside and outside the studio to get the best out of each opportunity.

There’s a wonderful artisanal studio called Local Works that, in the middle of Covid, helped us mix a brick out of construction waste materials and oyster and mussel shells. We worked with local partners in Ghent, our local architects Atama, and materials consultants BC Materials, to industrialize the process and get legislation for the bricks. We use municipal waste materials, which are effectively dirt cheap! 100,000 bricks have been made through their unique process. They take 100 days to dry out and sequester carbon for the next 100 years. Once the proof of concept is finished and delivered, we will make the recipe open source.

We work a lot with this idea of continuity and change, reconciling tradition and innovation, asking questions like, how do we construct a new building in a dense context of landscape and historic architecture? How can we play with those memories and associations when imagining architectural identity? And thinking of innovation – what type of opportunity can we bring to the project? They are usually driven by an environmental consciousness.

If we go back to the beginning of the practice… we set up in 2006, then the recession hit in 2008. We began working with extremes of architecture. At one point we were designing the 7 July Memorial with a design life of a few hundred years, while at the same time we were designing provisional architecture with lifespans of three days or three weeks. It focused us early on to think about doing the most with the least – materially, physically and environmentally. We were also thinking, particularly with the temporary projects, about leaving a long-lasting impression for people visiting them. The responsibility of architecture for the memorial was about resisting amnesia, not letting people forget.

Soane originally wanted a stone building but economized — so the gallery is built with London stock bricks and stone dressings. Soane lifts the heavy walls with subtle steps in the brickwork. We knew we didn’t want to use bricks but wanted to give our pavilion levity, so the timber wall steps out, inverting Soane’s load-bearing ziggurat building. We have made a timber frame ziggurat that gets bigger as it gets taller!

It’s very subtle, only small steps. The pavilion looks like it’s made from small pieces. We wanted it to feel handmade, more like a bandstand or garden pavilion with painted wood. We’ve kept the paint rough, with visible brushwork so the pinky Douglas fir comes through the grey-green paint. The metalwork of the canopies and the door recall the minty copper sulphate colour of the Soane Gallery’s front doors.

Soane’s building, built in 1817, is windowless, with daylight only from the roof. It was necessary to create lots of walls to hang paintings. It’s a wonderful piece of architecture as one of the first publicly visitable galleries, but it doesn’t necessarily engage new audiences. The idea was that as you come to one of the two entrances there, the form of the pavilion is aligned to face and greet you.

You’ve got this unfolding experience of a room in the landscape and with the big canopies that reach out in all directions, we felt it was important to extend the welcome of the building inside. Even though the pavilion’s constituency is for very young people, it is also a very important set piece of architecture and landscape.

I think you are influenced by all your experiences. Growing up in Australia, I developed a climatological focus early on. My first three years of architectural education at RMIT were very technical, based on a Murcutt-esque idea of how you design architecture to shade well, to passively control the environment, and that somehow architecture is a direct response to inhabitation. But for us, it’s more about creating the connection to the landscape, the experience of it through architecture.

Andy and I talk a lot about “coats on experience;” the overhangs at ArtPlay Pavilion or Windermere Jetty Museum provide not only shelter, but also a definition of space in the landscape without full enclosure. It’s the sense of extending the welcome outwards.

We just did a conference in Chicago on sustainability, and what was really apparent is that there is little impetus in the US for many institutional clients to decarbonize because gas and electricity are still relatively cheap. But we are increasingly called on as architects to coordinate the skills and expertise of a much wider field of specialists, engineers, artists and politicians – the very best minds in building technology – to optimize and build with as little carbon as possible.

Projects like the national repository of the British Library in Boston Spa and the conservation centre for Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Amiens come with full automation of storage and retrieval systems.

We have created a deoxygenated environment. Oxygen in air goes down to about 15 per cent, the same as base camp on Mount Everest. It’s like altitude training for sports people — a very specialist environment. Increasingly, architecture is about optimization and it’s one area where AI can help us, to think about how we can reduce materials and still achieve the most.

Many building typologies are becoming less human. Buildings like the British Library’s archive require fewer people to store and retrieve the national collection. We’ve got to be careful with such typologies if we want to engage people through architecture. We’re interested in the physicality of materials — designing buildings that provoke an emotional reaction.

The role of the architect is not just about giving creative identity, drawing the look and feel of a building, but also about synthesizing many ideas to make more responsible and responsive environments.

Bibliothèque nationale de France takes its identity from making the enclosure of this high-tech super box sheathed in a veil of stainless-steel chainmail. It has a very unusual ethereal presence in the landscape. We are now dealing with client needs that weren’t even imagined a few decades ago. We need new architectural languages.

Yes, but not just in material terms — also in the way we created a visitor centre at the heart of the box as part of the experience. It’s an important statement that these are public buildings.

The chainmail veil in Helensburgh creates a breathable layer where wind can whistle through, and the turbulence caused by that allows moisture to drop. More importantly, the chamber is 1 per cent solid, 99 per cent see-through. You can still see the house from outside. There was an epiphany moment with the client: if the house is visitable and visible, we can create a more human interaction with repair and conservation. If it were just a question of getting the right tin of paint, they would have done that 50 years ago. It’s not. This was a much more fundamental question of why we even care for these buildings.

These buildings, which take their cues from modern distribution warehouses, are unusual in scale. What we’ve done on the British Library masterplan is take that vernacular technology of the super shed but create small architectural steps in the surface. With shadows, you start to describe a more human scale that resonates with other buildings on the campus.

The Power Hall has the engines that would have powered all of that weaving and spinning that made Manchester’s fortune on display. Rather than have the new green heating system — which makes use of the aquifer deep below ground – behind a panel, we wanted to have that also on display and interpret it for visitors so people can see how steam is produced for the exhibits in real time. We’ve managed to reduce its carbon emissions by 515 tons a year, which is about the equivalent of 13 homes. This is about signposting and leading the way. We are also making the museum more permeable, with new public walkways connecting the site to the city to the north and south, to the east and west – yes, in the shape of a cruciform!