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Practising Architecture: Care, Conscience and Construction


“If in doubt – consult your conscience.” — Zygmunt Bauman

George Bernard Shaw called the professions “conspiracies against the laity” – that is, against lay people. More than a century later, plenty of homeowners would recognise the feeling: the architect who speaks in jargon, the drawings nobody can read, the fee that is hard to explain. The suspicion is fair. Trust is not something a profession is owed; it has to be earned, project by project.

Within the profession, the most influential answer to that suspicion in recent years has come from Jeremy Till. In Architecture Depends, he argues that architects have too often confused ethics with aesthetics, taking comfort in making beautiful objects, while the real ethical task is a responsibility for others: the builders, users, neighbours and passers-by whose lives a building touches, usually without their having any say. It is a powerful challenge.

The difficulty is what to do with it on a Monday morning. Much of what shapes our towns and cities lies far beyond an architect’s reach: the price of land, the economics of development, planning politics. A small practice working on homes cannot fix the housing market. What it can control is the building itself: What it is made of, how much energy it uses, how long it will last, who it serves, and how honestly we advise the people paying for it.

That is where I put my effort, and I think it is where much of our profession’s social contribution actually lies. What follows are the principles that guide how I work. Each one is a belief, and each comes with evidence, because a principle you can’t prove is only a promise.

1. Read before you design

Every building is evidence, if you know how to read it.

I learned this with a crowbar before I learned it with a pencil. As a young labourer, I helped restore a Grade II listed coaching inn in the Cotswolds. Around one fireplace we peeled back the decades one layer at a time: 1980s, 1960s, Victorian, and further still, until we reached the original inglenook. It was large enough to stand in, with the remains of the wooden benches where cold travellers once sat. The building kept giving up its secrets. A false ceiling hid beautiful timber roof beams. A partition wall hid a 35-foot well, blocked with its own curved kerb stones flipped over. A stair down to the old cellar had been filled with rubble. Every discovery had been hidden by someone deciding, at some point, that what was there didn’t matter.

That experience sent me looking for buildings with stories to read. Treasurer’s House in York showed me the other side of it. Its back wall tells four hundred years of history at a glance, while its front and interior were dressed by an Edwardian owner as a staged tour through history, complete with a ‘medieval’ hall created around 1900. Between the two, I learned to tell real layers from fictional ones, and to look hard at a building before deciding what to do with it.

The same habit unlocked a Grade II listed flat in Kensington. Decades of alterations, false ceilings and fake Corinthian columns had hidden how the floor originally worked. The architect, J.J. Stevenson, had published a book on house planning shortly before he built it, and reading it alongside old planning drawings showed exactly where his kitchen had been, and which later additions could go. That research changed the council’s view and made the project possible.

This is the part of the work no machine or template can do: judging what matters in one particular building. Not everything needs changing. Some things are the way they are for perfectly good reasons, and the job is to find out which.

2. Measure, and share what you find

A design prediction is only a hypothesis until the meter readings come in.

When we retrofitted our own Victorian terrace in Crofton Park, the energy model predicted 2,112 kWh a year for heating. In its first full year, the house used 709. Total energy use came to 37.3 kWh per square metre, and with solar panels, a battery and a smart tariff, the monthly bill is just a little more than £10 per month. The model wasn’t simply right or wrong: re-running it with the airtightness we might have achieved to the external walls brought it much closer, and the gap confirmed my suspicion about how terraced houses really lose heat, which is not accounted for in energy models usually.

I have published all of it, including the parts that didn’t match. That openness matters. Richard and Daniel Susskind, in The Future of the Professions, describe a choice between expertise that is fenced off and sold, and expertise that is shared. Their conclusion is that, given the choice, “most people would choose to liberate rather than enclose.” I agree. When professionals keep their knowledge mysterious, mistrust follows. When homeowners understand their own houses, they make better decisions, with or without an architect.

So the data is online and the journal post is there for anyone thinking about their own home.

3. Make it, don’t just draw it

For most of architecture’s history, the drawing has been a set of instructions handed to someone else, with plenty lost in translation between the idea and the object.

Digital fabrication changes that. With a CNC machine, the drawing is the making: the file goes straight to the cutter. Bat Wing Studio, a garden office in Berkshire, is made of 141 unique plywood parts cut from 18 sheets, each one modelled, load-tested with the engineers, and cut exactly as drawn.

I also build things myself. At Coast House in Cumbria, I made the staircase, the porch and the kitchen. Nearby, I built a boat shed, and I’ve just finished a new garden office and workshop at home in London. At a smaller scale I’ve made tables and cupboards from scratch, and a set of cutlery, laser cut from a single sheet with zero wastage. Having made things with my own hands, I am a much better designer. You learn quickly which details are easy to build and which only look good on paper, how much tolerance a joint really needs, and how a material behaves when you cut it, carry it and fix it. That knowledge goes back into every drawing I produce for someone else to build.

4. Do the most with the least

There is an old story about a power tool company that shows new executives a picture of a gleaming drill and asks what they sell. The answer they’re looking for is a picture of a neat hole in a wall. Customers don’t want a drill; they want the hole.

Architecture is the same. Clients don’t want drawings, or even necessarily a new building. They want a better home. The best response to a brief is not always a building. Sometimes it is a careful retrofit, sometimes a smaller extension than expected, sometimes it is just taking away a later addition that never worked.

The greenest building is usually the one that already exists. Our own retrofit came in at 296 kgCO₂e per square metre over its whole life (assuming the industry standard of 60 years- I’m sure it will last far longer than that), counted rather than guessed, and within the industry’s 2030 target. Keeping what is there, and adding only what is needed, is better for the planet and usually better for the budget.

5. Conscience before code
Regulations and professional codes set the minimum. They matter, but they are not the same thing as doing right.

An architect owes a duty to the client, and a duty to everyone else a building affects: neighbours, future occupants, the people who build it, and the planet. These duties sometimes pull against each other. Balancing them will never be easy. Neither should be thrown out; they must be done together, or both will fail.

In practice, that means honest advice even when it means spending less. It means telling a client what their house actually needs, rather than what would make the grandest project. It means choosing existing homes and private clients over speculative development. And it means treating safety and longevity as non-negotiable, however inconvenient they are to the look of a design.

6. Every house is part of something bigger

It is easy to assume that the social side of architecture belongs to public buildings and housing schemes, and that a practice working on private homes has little to offer it. I don’t think that’s true.

Most of the homes we will live in over the coming decades already exist, and a great many of them are cold, damp and expensive to heat. Every one we make comfortable and cheap to run is a household freed from fuel bills, a little less demand on the grid, and a building kept in use rather than replaced. That is a social good, even when the client is a single family.

The contribution doesn’t stop at the property line. A Victorian terrace shares party walls, a street and a character with its neighbours; how one house is altered affects everyone who lives beside it or walks past it. A conservation area is a kind of commons, held in trust by everyone who owns a piece of it. Treating an old building with care is respect for that shared inheritance, not only for the client.

And knowledge travels further than buildings do. Our terrace in Crofton Park is one of thousands of near-identical houses across London. By publishing what it cost, what it saves and what didn’t work, one retrofit can inform many others. The “other” that Till asks us to take responsibility for includes the next owner of the house, the neighbours on either side, and the household three streets away with the same house and the same problem, reading the data and deciding what to do.

This is a modest version of architecture’s social mission, but it is a real one. It doesn’t depend on winning the argument about land or capital. It depends on doing good work and being open about it.

7. Stay small, stay nimble

There is a quiet assumption in architecture that success means growth: more staff, bigger offices, larger projects. I’ve chosen not to follow it.

The sociologist Elliott Krause, quoted by the Susskinds, warns that when professional work is organised mainly for profit, it stops putting the person who needs the service first, and the profession drifts “from something special to just another way to make a living.” Indy Johar, co-founder of Architecture 00, has described watching a practice grow from seventeen people to sixty-five: the people were still excellent, but the demands of managing them turned careful designers into producers of images.

A small practice escapes much of that pressure. With low overheads, there is no machine of salaries to feed, so I can give honest advice: recommend a smaller project, turn down the wrong one, or spend time on research that a larger office couldn’t justify. Clients work with the architect who designs, details and visits site, not a team they meet once.

Small doesn’t mean alone. I work with a trusted network: structural engineers, fabricators, quantity surveyors, M&E and energy consultants, party wall surveyors, builders who understand old buildings, and freelancers for discrete tasks when a project needs extra hands. I assemble the right team for each project, then we all work together to make the vision a reality.

And small is nimble. A practice of one can adopt a new tool, a new method or a new standard in a week, whether that is CNC fabrication, Passivhaus modelling or BIM standard. It can test ideas on real buildings and change course when the evidence says so. In a profession facing as much change as ours, that agility may be worth more than size.

Working on it

None of these principles are finished. I’m completing my certified Passivhaus Designer course in November, the house is collecting another year of data, and every old building teaches something new.

There is one more idea worth holding on to. The philosopher Anthony Kenny observed that technology makes sins of omission as real as sins of commission. Doing nothing is a choice too. For our profession, the risk is less that we build badly than that we stand back: leaving existing homes as they are, keeping what we learn to ourselves, or waiting for someone else to fix the system. Each of us can do something about the buildings in front of us, and share what we find.

Tom Parsons is a RIBA Chartered Architect working on old homes, retrofit and digitally fabricated buildings. About

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