The Shape Summer Lecture with Piercy Conner Architects and Designers: What is context and how should architecture respond to it?

June 18th, 2008

'Should we pay lip service to political thrust and parry. Stimulate the old? Tick boxes of a citywide development plan or re establish historical ambience and carefully respond to climate and orientation. Relevance is in the eye of the beholder.' ~Stuart Piercy

'You always have to work out how to stitch into the local area, you can’t just come in with a whole new set of rules.' ~Stuart Piercy

‘There is always so much more than just physical constraints' ~Stuart Piercy

Stuart Piercy:

• Launched the internationally renowned Microflat affordable housing concept - the subject of an ITV documentary and the BBC's Panorama programme
• Continues to develop ideas on modular affordable housing - winning the Velux lifetime homes competition with a fully modular, flexible housing scheme
• Is the winner of Living Steel Award with the SymHouse
• Is a visiting tutor at the Architectural Association, lecturing throughout the UK on Future Technologies in Construction. He is currently running a degree unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
• Worked for Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners where he worked on such projects as Zurich Airport, Pusan Rail Terminal and early concept designs for the Eden project in Cornwall and the EIHMS University teaching building in Guildford
• Contemporary architecture often stands accused of 'not fitting in' with it's surroundings, of insensitivity to context. Piercy Conner Architects work to create contemporary buildings, which are contextual in the broad sense of the term - linguistically, materially, programmatically - through the use of extensive context analysis and synthesis.