Concept Four thin wings, one thick threshold
Court House No. 4
A family house arranged as four walls around a planted court, so every room borrows light from the same square of sky.
Fictional studio study · drawn in vector, no photography
A building is a wall around the sky
FORM / FIELD works on thresholds: the shaded edge where a building meets open air. Six invented projects, one method, and an obsession with the room you pass through rather than the one you photograph.
Scroll — the court answers
Six studies in enclosure
Every project below is invented for this demo. Each is drawn as a section, plan or elevation so the idea is legible before the words. The concept label is the one line the studio would defend in a planning meeting.
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Concept One room, repeated, each a little quieter
Reading Rooms, Aldermarket
A hall of stepped vaults where the ceiling drops as you walk deeper, so silence is made by geometry rather than signage.
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Concept Keep the shell, thread a new room through it
Northmill Tannery
A derelict tannery keeps its brick, loses its roof, and gains a timber gallery that passes through the old window openings.
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Concept Cut the hill, never fill it
Terrace Field House
Four platforms step down a slope. Nothing is imported to level the ground, so the house sits in the hill like a walled field.
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Concept Daylight does the work of a ceiling
Public Baths, Halloway
Three slots in the roof drop light straight into the water. The hall needs almost no artificial light between nine and four.
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Concept A screen, not a façade
Granary Arches
Eight brick bays become a working screen: shade in summer, low sun in winter, and a market under the arches on Saturdays.
No projects in that category yet.
Turn the block before you draw it
A live massing study of the courtyard scheme. Drag it, or use the arrow keys once it has focus. It is the same six-bay proportion as the drawing above, cut down to bare volumes.
- ←→ rotate
- ↑↓ tilt
- Drag orbit
Loading the study…
Five stages, and what you get at the end of each
A studio process is only useful if you can see the deliverable. These are the five points where we stop and hand something over.
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Walk the site
Two hours on foot. We record sun, noise, and where people already cross the boundary. No drawings yet.
Deliverable A one-page site note and six photographs.
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Test three masses
Three physical sketch models at 1:200, cut from card. Cheap, fast, and easier to argue with than a render.
Deliverable Three models, one preferred direction.
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Draw the threshold
We draw the entry at 1:20 before anything else. If the threshold works, the plan usually follows.
Deliverable Threshold drawings and a materials board.
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Resolve the junctions
Where wall meets roof, roof meets water, water meets ground. Most building failures live in these three lines.
Deliverable A junction set and a costed schedule.
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Stay on site
Weekly visits through construction, with a written note each time. The drawings change; the intent should not.
Deliverable Site notes, snag list, as-built set.
A studio built around one question
Why does the room you enter matter more than the room you photograph? We started FORM / FIELD to answer that, and we have not finished.
The practice is small on purpose. Four people, three or four projects a year, and a rule that nobody draws a façade before we have stood on the site at the hour the building will actually be used.
That habit comes from a decade of watching good plans fail at the front door: a step in the wrong place, a door that faces the wind, a corridor that nobody takes because the short way is more obvious. None of those problems are visible in a render. All of them are visible from the pavement.
So we draw slowly, model in card, and keep a courtyard at the centre of almost everything. This page is a fictional demonstration of how that work would be presented — the projects, people and figures here are invented for the demo.
Questions we are asked first
What does a first conversation cost?
Nothing. The first hour is a site walk and a talk about budget. If we are wrong for the project, we will say so in that hour and suggest two practices who are not.
Can you work with a building that already exists?
Most of our work is reuse. We start by measuring what is there and deciding what is genuinely worth keeping — usually the structure and the openings, rarely the services.
How do you handle a tight budget?
We cost the plan at stage two, not stage four. If the money will not reach, better to redraw the massing than to value-engineer the junctions later.
Do you take on interiors only?
Sometimes, when the shell is sound and the problem is genuinely about light and threshold. We will not take an interiors job that is really a rescue of someone else's plan.
What should I prepare before we speak?
A rough budget range, the site address or drawings if you have them, and one sentence about how you want to use the building. The planner on this page will put those into a single document you can keep.
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