6a architects: On the Ground
A Conversation with Stephanie Macdonald, Tom Emerson and Owen Lo Watson
Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku

Text published in El Croquis 236 6a architects 2018 2026.

 

ON FINDING EACH OTHER

Mio Tsuneyama: Our meeting with 6a really began with Never Modern. I first heard about your work in Irénée Scalbert's lecture at Tokyo University of the Arts, and the book was very touching for me. I had just finished my first project in Japan, after coming back from Switzerland, and I was struggling with how to engage with time in Japan's ad hoc urban fabric shaped by micro-topographies and constant rebuilding. What really struck me was how you carefully read these seemingly insignificant traces of the past and carry their stories forward into the future. It showed me another way of reading the city — not only through its buildings, but through small traces of human livelihoods like roads, walls, and fragments. The Richard Wentworth's photographs in the book also became an important reference for us.

The overall tone of Never Modern also stayed with me. Architecture, and even the architect, seems to recede into the background. It captured something of the atmosphere in Japan in the mid-2010s, after the Great East Japan Earthquake, when many of us were questioning the idealism of the previous period of growth. It became the first English book I read all the way through. We got interested in how you work with existing elements, but also in your hands-on, communal approach to make architecture, to making architecture with students, clients, historians, photographers, builders, and others. We became curious about why society, only now in this century, started to value in these kinds of processes, so we went to London to see it for ourselves. For us it was a completely new way of thinking about architecture, and at the same time it felt strangely intuitive, almost nostalgic: creating something new through the hidden work of conserving buildings, supported by a bottom-up, civic attitude rather than an institutional one. Is that your fundamental interest in architecture — or is it more that Brexit, migration, this social context, has been shaping your work?

Stephanie Macdonald: I think Never Modern captured a lot of that process, but it was actually quite unconscious at the time — we were feeling around for how to work with these buildings, for their measure, their rhythm, and the research we did along the way led us to different places. It was early on; we'd done small projects like Oki-ni straight out of college, and I think we were already asking how a project sits culturally in a city. What does it mean for a fashion brand, for a shop, to behave like a gallery? What are the systems at that bigger scale, and how do you unpick or reshape them? That question comes into every project since. There's always been a social dimension to it for us, even when it isn't explicit: making things accessible to everybody.

Owen Lo Watson: There's a long-term history in a project like Raven Row, and a much shorter one, particular to UK cities, London especially. The long-term history has always been about people arriving, exchanging, moving ideas — and that builds the infrastructure, the institutions, of a city. Raven Row became two buildings because of the Huguenot silk weavers and merchants, persecuted in France, brought their trade with them to that part of London and grew it. The shorter history is that over the last thirty or forty years the UK has benefited from extraordinary contemporary public architecture — Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron really celebrated how the role of culture rose, especially from the 1990s onwards. These landmark public projects were all about making art accessible, making places where people came together. That fuelled a building culture that ran up to around 2008, until the crash. Since then we've been putting things back together with public projects that aren't new buildings —more process-driven, using existing fabric, less funding— trying to achieve the same thing: equality, access to culture, places to meet.

Tom Emerson: It's interesting that your question is also very contemporary —Brexit, migration— and, as Steph says, we probably weren't fully conscious of that at the time. Owen's right about the long arc: Spitalfields has been the arrival point for different communities since the eighteenth century, French Protestants first, then Jewish communities from central Europe, then Bengali and South Asian communities in the twentieth. It's near the river but outside the City, so people were freer to do what they did. The tragedy of Brexit is not realising that culture is fuelled by migration, not stopped by it. What we do is an architecture of small things, tied to a field of wider societal ideas, you don’t need a massive building to operate within a cultural realm. A lot of these projects are collective over a very long period; we're the last team to join a place, not the first. More a relay than a complete team.

ON THE UNFINISHED

TE: I first came across your work through Laurent Stalder at ETH. He asked me, "have you heard of 'Holes in the House'?" I hadn't. But I just remember thinking: that is such a great title. It's such an unlikely way to introduce an architect. Then you came and gave the talk, and it all made sense...I wanted to ask you something about your book Urban Wild Ecology which feels like a kind of answer to Never Modern. It's a beautiful read. I was intrigued by the idea of the unfinished — both in the house you're sitting in now [Holes in the House, Tokyo], and thematically in your work. The holes feel like they're unfinished. What is it, for you, about the unfinished?

Fuminori Nousaku: We wanted to talk about the future of the building too. We see architecture as a temporary assemblage of actors, people, knowledge, history, and materials which will probably move on to other destinations one day. Even with this building: some of its materials will eventually leave, and a corresponding part of its narrative with it. So, we wanted to make a hole in the current model of the housing industry, the buildings are often demolished and rebuilt once they are considered "complete" rather than carefully maintained. If we let go the idea of completion, we never waste our knowledge, our history, the skills of the people who worked on it and the materials too. In our rapidly changing world, especially in relation to the environment, knowledge and technology are advancing so quickly. What seems right today may be questioned tomorrow. If a building remains open to change and renewal, we can keep testing new knowledge and technologies while accepting the mistakes of the past.

In projects like Raven Row and Skinners’ Hall, the old and the new are not treated as opposites. The architects' intervention is not presented as a clear break or turning point; different layers of time simply coexist within the buildings, leaving them open to further transformation.

SM: That's not something one is taught. In college it was more often about the object, the composition of things, so it felt unusual to bring in the personal, the social, those intangible histories held in the fabric of a building. I think it comes from a reaction to buildings being demolished: but even in a new building, those histories are still there to find, and if you keep a trace of them, people feel able to inhabit the space, whether it's new or old. With something like Raven Row, simply steam cleaning the floorboards instead of sanding them, reveals three hundred years of use — and I think people read those signs in the fabric of a place, even subconsciously. If you're not attentive to them, it's easy to erase them, and not see the beauty, or the resonance, in that. That's something we took from Richard Wentworth's work too, his reading of the urban fabric, of things that look like scrap or damage, with real tenderness, understood socially and historically but never academically. Once you understand material that way, you're building with the old as much as the new, and people feel, when they come in, that the space belongs to them because these stories stop belonging to a single owner or institution. In London, where much tends to be privately owned, that can be very exclusive. If you're attentive to your materials, you can undercut that, even inside a commercial project.

 

The full text is available for purchase on the website of El Croquis.