How Not to Kill a Building

Kasan Goh of Clay Architecture will be giving a talk at Canterbury School of Architecture at 5.30pm on the 19th of January 2016:

This talk is something I've been kicking about for a while, and the title came from a conversation I had over coffee with Allan Atlee of CSA some time ago, where I was mouthing out about how much bloody work it took just to keep projects alive. We thought it'll be a great idea to base a talk around the seldom-talked about, less glamorous aspects of being an architect, and some of the challenges of small practice in the regions. About as far removed from Starchitecture as you can get. Raymond Quek invited me to test drive the talk at De Montford Leicester School of Architecture last November, where it generated a lively Q&A, now I'm looking forward to chatting to the students at CSA.

About Clays:

‘… the pattern for most architectural firms is to set up in London ( or another big city ), and compete in a hot soup of young practices, using every opportunity to create small photogenic projects to catapault them to the holy grail of public projects. Breaking the mould, Camilla Prizeman and Kasan Goh, a husband and wife team who met at the Architectural Association school in 1991, set out to create a different sort of practice when they moved away to Gravesend in Kent in 2000. Their unusual strategy has paid off and… they have created a practice steeped in its history and place in a way that is hard to achieve in the capital. Prizeman and Goh are more interested in the way that people will react to and behave in their buildings, than what the projects look like in magazines- though they do look extremely good. As Prizeman and Goh say: ‘There may be something to be learnt from concentrating on the design of normal and everyday things and places.’

Vicky Richardson, Blueprint, 2008