NEW PRACTICE

MACMAG: To begin, could you give us an overview of you and your work as a practice?

Marc Cairns: We are New Practice. We are a women and LGBTQ+ led architecture practice based in Glasgow and London. We have a team of ten staff in Glasgow and two in London. All of our work across the built environment concerns enabling, supporting, and building on the community, creative and cultural capacity of places. We do that through meanwhile use projects, through projects that focus on spaces for communities, through retrofit projects, and through community engagement. Everything we do is about bringing people closer to that decision making process, which inevitably underpins their lived experience of the built environment and the world around them. We have been doing that as New Practice since April 2019, so we are almost four years old!

Becca Thomas: And we have been doing that more widely, working together since 2011, with previous practices and previous explorations in similar types of practice or similar types of ways of using our architectural education in that space, more as allies in that earlier bit of our careers.

MM: Could you also give us a quick overview of yourselves as individuals as well?

BT: I am Becca Thomas; Creative Director at New Practice and I am an architect. I work with our team to make sure that what we are doing is really exciting and interesting and that we have a shared creative direction, if not a shared individual practice style.

MC: I am Marc Cairns; I am Managing Director at New Practice. I am responsible for overseeing the day-to-day delivery and management of the practice, which includes both operations and portfolio as well as leading our business.

MM: A few months ago, you came to GSA for a Friday Lecture which we thoroughly enjoyed, and you spoke a lot about community engagement in particular. Could you tell us a bit about how this works practically - in terms of working with community?

MC: New Practice is a business. We are not a community interest company, we are not a charity, we are not a volunteer organisation. Everyone who works here is paid and remunerated and it is their job, their chosen space to work in in practice. In terms of community engagement, we work nine times out of ten as a paid consultant to either the public sector or the private sector. With that comes conditions and a scope of work and an expectation of data information, conversations, outcomes, and outputs that are coming from that community engagement. Lots of other people and different businesses do that and where we have always seen the advantage of New Practice doing that, is we make it a process that is not only creative in terms of the way that we author that process but is about how you make it a mutually beneficial experience for that community.

Our real focus is about making it a creative experience. Doing that actually drills down into some really interesting information that can help influence and reform decisions that are being made within design teams around the built environment. Using that architectural experience and knowledge to make sure that the information we are bringing from communities, back to either our own design team or to wider design teams, is actually well articulated. Often, we work a lot with bringing advocacy groups into those processes. For example, with Buchanan Galleries and George Square, we have been working with different disabled rights advocacy groups, women's rights groups and youth rights groups to make sure they have a seat at the table and their voices are being heard. Broadly, that is our approach to community engagement but the way in which we deliver it is quite bespoke to every project depending on the character of the community and of the client.

BT: Community engagement work is the core way that we bring people closer to those decisions. Those decisions are happening at scales of; local, national, or corporate. The changes that happen to cities or towns or town centres or neighbourhoods, those are really the processes by which we can make sure that the people who will experience that change can say “I think this is where my experience will be made better if this can happen”. I think for us, that is the balance for community engagement. It is making sure that there is a route. It might not be a direct connection to a decision maker, or it might not be getting to make final decisions about everything, but there is an understanding about why decisions have been made the way they have been made, and there is a clear route through from the conversations we have been having to what might happen at the end.

MM: How does your approach differ when your role in the project is that of an architect or a community engagement role?

BT: The difference is in the continued authorship. Our work around retrofit, around spaces for communities or in the built architecture field includes that engagement work so we make time for it. We create spaces to have it. But we are then able to take those conversations and do that design work. We are not going to be passing that over to a third party who may or may not listen or who may not be able to take that on board with all the other constraints and everything else they have got to deal with. But then we can try really hard to continue that thread and be that single author, and I think that is where we try and connect those two spaces. For projects like Kinning Park Complex, for instance, that is a really good example of starting from an engagement space, starting with lots of conversations, talking about needs and what they want, and moving that through into a built outcome that works really well for that community and is delivering on the outcomes. For us, that is the role of architecture, that is the role of an architect. It is that journey more than the pretty picture at the end. Actually bringing people along with you on that journey, making sure that there is a shared understanding, shared learning and knowledge being developed is a much more powerful outcome.

MC: I think what happens a lot in our industry is this idea of “what's more valuable? What's more important? What's better to be doing?” And often in our industry, a project architect spending two months doing a door schedule is seen as doing better work than someone who is doing community engagement on the ground, talking to people. That is a problem because actually, what the industry should all be doing, is everyone should be working across that matrix of skills and interest. So when we position it, what is the difference or who has the power or the ownership? Is it the architect or the person asking the questions? That should not be split, it should be about where practices should have true intersectionality in how they think about that. I think it is about where we establish our barometer of what is deemed as a successful practice outcome for practitioners as well.

MM: Is there more of a conversation to be had in the industry of what a practice is and does?

MC: The first point to that question is probably what industry are we talking about? And I think geographically the UK is quite problematic as an industry. There is London and there is the rest of the UK. There is beginning to be some of that interesting, good growth by design, process driven place making outside of London and beginning to come into Glasgow on a kind of local and national government level, but I think there are some very poor examples of practice and creative authorship in Scotland. They are still doing far too much work within the built environment, and, predicating the same poor processes lacking directionality, lacking diversity in their team, lacking morals, lacking standards, lacking quality. That is beginning to be challenged a lot more proactively in London, as much as I hate to do that comparison. We have far more complex, nuanced conversations about what is the role of an architect, what is the role of a commission, when we are working in places like London or Cambridge, than we do probably have in Scotland. I think there is a kind of movement coming off the back of intense global changes in perspective across 20202021. If that is penetrating Scotland yet, I am not sure.

MM: What could be the change in the industry?

MC: I think unfortunately the problem that exists is around nepotism and privilege within practice. The conversation needs to extend from the importance of equality and diversity to cover privilege and intergenerational wealth, access, nepotism, people whose parents are developers.

BT: It is much easier to start a traditional architecture practice if Mummy and Daddy are going to give you 400 units, or even let you build their own house. Even at that single house scale, you are starting from a different space. We are sitting in our first building. It took us six years to get to that point where we could take a risk to do a building ourselves, because no one else could take that risk on us, because we were a very young practice at the time. We were doing a lot of this really exciting work around engagement and around master planning and urban planning all across Scotland and into the UK but no one could say, “Oh yeah, we know you can do that, so if we give you half a million pounds of public funding, this is not going to go wrong.” Great things did land on us in that first year of practice, we got to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale, and deliver public art projects for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. We got to do really amazing things, but those do not get you the same “Oh yes, you're a successful practice” .

MC: Most projects are now procured through the Excel framework, which is engineer led. Multidisciplinary FTSE 100, NASDAQ companies are the ones that tender for these projects, and it is in their gift to invite a diverse practice to join them. I think the answer is actually at a quite significant senior government executive level, to have vision and promote change, to recognize the way that top-down thinking about the built environment in this country and (by this country, I mean Scotland) is not working. We have talked a lot about place, and people, and place-based practice and the importance of community led design and we have the Community Empowerment Bill, which is an incredible piece of legislation which does not exist anywhere else in the UK, but it is not being used.

BT: I think the vision is there, legislatively, but there is that gap in the middle. You do not end up with those interesting practices delivering work. I think that we will see change, but it is going to take a decade. If it is legislative, it is going to take time to resolve it. In the meantime, you have to figure out: how do you do the interesting projects? How do you make sure that you do not just fold under that pressure that exists?

MM: You described in the Friday Lecture about the work with Buchanan Galleries. Is it one of the things that it' s better to be in the tent than out the tent?

MC: All of our work as a practice sits predominantly in the grey space, nothing we do is black or white. You cannot have a fully altruistic approach to anything as an architect, or as a practitioner in that field, and you should not have to because you live in a capital society.

It is why I began this conversation by saying “we are a business”. It is my responsibility as managing director to remunerate my staff, my employees, etc. You can do that by working as a profit focused architecture practice, but you can also choose to do that in a way that is nimble enough that you can have as much influence and as much input in the things that are actually impacting long term change within the build environment. There is often this conversation about what is good, what is bad, and beyond just aesthetic, beyond what is deemed “good architecture” or “bad architecture” , “what's a good client? A bad client?”

- “Who's a good developer or bad developer?” That is all just like semantics and marketing rubbish and it is actually the understanding of where young people like yourselves, who are graduating, who have to think smarter than that, and figure out where they can work as allies to each other in that kind of grey space to eventually subvert the system.

BT: I think grey space is a really interesting space to be in because you can be in it for a public sector client as much as you can be in it for a private sector client and I think it is always that balance, particularly in community engagement, is having clients who come to us and say, “this is the answer I want”. That is not how we do community engagement.

That is fine if that is the answer you are seeking. I am not going to ask questions that are going to lead us to that answer. I am going to ask the open questions that you have hired me to ask because that is the right, ethical, moral thing to do. If we come to that answer, that is great and I am really glad it supports your position, but if it does not come to that answer, I am going to push back on every change you make to that report to make sure that we are balancing needs and wants against each other. I think that is a really powerful thing for our clients to understand. Even if they choose to ignore our input entirely.

When someone says at a later date “we got 20 million planning objections” at least someone will be able to trace that back and understand the decision they made, and what the impact is, and that is as powerful as a client understanding when and how they have made good decisions and that they should keep making them. They can also learn from bad decisions and where they are messing up.

MM: It was interesting to hear how you were saying you were sharing space with other people. How does that influence your way of working?

MC: What you have is access to a trusted network of collaborators. There are a couple of different practitioners who we often bring into projects if we need a graphic design agency or if we need an illustrator because we know they are a trusted friend and Creative Ally. But I think in the reality of being an architecture practice, probably punching above our weight for our scaling of resources quite often, it means we are all heads down, focused unfortunately. What Becca and I have to do is, as practice leaders, is to make sure that that creative discourse is not coming from a conversation with latent bystanders over lunch, that we are making space for it within the calendar week. We do quite in-depth update meetings, and we have design reviews every second week, and we do a lot of “during work time but non work activity” as well, like social creative thinking. I think I would rather be here than in a kind of soulless “WeWork” space. That is why we built this studio space (Many Studios, 3 Ross Street). I think the real usefulness about being in this building is living in that live act of Stage 7 of the Plan of Work, and taking a lot of lessons learned from what does not work well about this building, or is not successful about it, or is not conducive for creative community, cultural, shared, thinking and trying to avoid that in the future.

BT: I guess it gives us another avenue by which to explore the things that we want to explore, place and people and bring them together. We are also directors of the studio, who run the space, and that avenue allows us to be a client. At the moment, we are working together with Many Studios at New Practice to look at alternate spaces or other properties in the city where we might expand and think about how that will impact other neighbourhoods. It gives us a chance to have a different ‘hat’ within that built environment space, we get to be the client and the person who gets to make the decisions and understand the money side of it, more so than the architect often. Bringing that together with our architect ‘hat’ and sitting the two of them next to each other and just seeing where we can take that next thing. Obviously this is our first one, and we are working on a second, which will happen at some point in the next 5 to 10 years. It's a good way for us to think about the challenges or the ways to brief now, versus when we were doing this. It is a nice way to exist, not just as the architect always, but also as a person who can do that other side of the project.

MM: I resonate with what you said about “junior designers just do as they’re told” does that translate into your practice that the conversation should be less hierarchical

BT: We do have a hierarchy, we need one. It makes sense for us to understand where legal and financial pressures lie, and there has to be some decision making that happens top down, but we try and make as much flat conversational space as possible so that if anyone has an idea, they can bring that to the table and we try and make sure that we have those spaces so that it is not scary to bring an idea to the table either. We have some “Show & Tells” and we have Design Reviews and we have big update meetings. All those as a big team and each of those are a place to really say “actually I think we could be doing this a bit better” or “we could change this or we could move this” and as long as we cannot see a really good reason why we are not going to do it, we can always test that out. We have been going through a process of looking at our own internal well-being and resource management and making sure that is as good as we can make it. Lots of those ideas come from people who work for us in graduate positions because Marc and I have not been employees, we have not worked for someone else for a really long time, we are not the best placed to say “actually it would really help if my boss did this”. I do not remember the last time I had a boss where I had to sign things off, so it is making sure that that space is actually open to say, “actually this is what would be really helpful in my workplace” and that is a thing that can be influenced everywhere. so I understand why it takes a bit of time for people to experience that as being a positive thing. It is important that we are a responsible employer and that people have mechanisms to have executive decision making. I think the second thing is, I am all for there being a flat hierarchy, but I am not just for there being an abundance of opinions with no action on how to implement them. I am not a sponge for just hearing everyone's ideas. If those ideas do not come with, “how are we actually going to do it?” So, I think that is something that needs to be a focus as well, because that is quite an important practice and life skill. If something is not working or you have an idea, great. But why? And how do you do that? They should not expect the opinions to be flat and all the solutions to come top down, they have to be flat solutions as well. I think that is something that as an employer and someone with power, that I think is still important. It is not just always; opinion, opinion, opinion.

MC: There are two things to sum up: A lot of places where people have worked before having that hierarchy

Emma Burke Newman, a Stage 2 at the Mack, was involved in a road traffic accident earlier this year. It was later confirmed that she had died.

Though Emma was a relatively new addition to the school, having started in September 2022, she had already made an impact and had made a number of close friendships. We will all miss her.

As well as being a student Emma also worked at New Practice. This is how they remember her.