Practice
An aperture is an opening. It is a thing a wall does, not a setting on a camera.
Specify for the tenth winter
Every material we use is chosen against a single question: what will this be like after ten years of the weather it will actually get, maintained by the people who will actually live with it?
That question rules out a great deal. It rules out finishes that need a specialist. It rules out products that may not be manufactured in a decade. It rules out anything whose failure mode is ugly rather than merely older — a lacquer that flakes is worse than a bare metal that tarnishes, even though the lacquer looks better for the first eighteen months.
What survives the question is a short palette. Six materials do most of our work. We know how each of them behaves wet, how it behaves in a south reveal, and what it costs to put right. That knowledge is more useful to a client than range.
Scotland and the north of England, within a day
The studio is on Bonnington Road in Leith. We work where we can get to site and back inside a day, which in practice means Scotland and as far south as Yorkshire.
This is not a lifestyle preference. Detailing that depends on a particular mason needs the architect to be on site while the mason is, and we would rather decline a commission than run one by photograph.
Mairi Duthie
Founded the studio in 2011 after eight years in Copenhagen and one very cold winter surveying agricultural buildings in Aberdeenshire, which is where the interest in weathering started. Leads the housing work and writes most of the specifications.
Tomas Reinholt
Joined in 2014. Runs the adaptive reuse work and every conversation with a structural engineer that begins with the words "in principle". Teaches one day a fortnight at Edinburgh.
Effie Lang
Trained in furniture before architecture, which shows in the joinery drawings and in a low tolerance for anything specified from a catalogue photograph. Leads the interiors work and the studio's relationships with the makers.
Callum Sharp
Runs sites. Keeps the record drawings, which in this studio means the drawings are still correct at handover rather than six months out of date — a distinction that sounds administrative until the building needs altering in fifteen years.
The record drawings are correct at handover
This sounds administrative. It is the single most useful thing we do for a building's second thirty years.
Most projects hand over a drawing set that stopped being true somewhere around the second variation. When the building needs altering in fifteen years, somebody pays a surveyor to rediscover what is behind the walls. We keep the record set current as the work proceeds, and hand it over as the deliverable it is.
“A blind is a building admitting it got the orientation wrong.”
On the reading room having no south glazing