We are often asked why the studio works with such a narrow palette. Limewashed brick, oiled oak, raw concrete, brushed steel, a few weights of linen for curtains. The list is short and we have written it down. It is taped to the wall above the model stand.

The honest answer is that we are not interested in invention for its own sake. We are interested in attention. A short list of materials forces us to look harder at each one, to know how an oak floor takes a low sun in February and a high sun in July, to know which limewash will chalk in the rain and which will hold.

A quiet building is not an empty building. It is a building that does not ask for the visitor’s attention before the visitor has decided to give it. The proportions are settled. The light is settled. The door handle sits where your hand expects it. Nothing is shouting.

We want the building to be the second thing you notice, after the weather.

This takes more drawing, not less. Restraint is expensive. The detail that disappears took three weeks and four prototypes. The wall that looks effortless was built by a mason who has been laying brick for forty-one years and who left us a long voicemail about the mortar mix.

Every project starts with a list of what we are removing. No skirting boards. No fluorescent lighting. No ceiling grids. No interior fluorescence of any kind. No “feature wall.” The list grows as the building grows, and by the end of a project the list is often longer than the specification.

A house we finished on Bornholm last spring has only seven different materials in it. We counted. The client noticed first. She said the house felt longer than it was, that walking through it was like walking along a beach.

On quiet architecture

Daylight is the only material in a building that arrives free, changes every minute, and cannot be returned to the supplier. We treat it as the most important specification in a project and we draw it before we draw walls.

Step one: walk the site at the worst hour

Every project begins with a site visit between 14:00 and 16:00 on the shortest plausible day of the year. We bring a folding stool and a paper compass. We sit. We watch where the light is, and more importantly where it is not. The early sketches are not of the building. They are of the shadow it will cast at four in the afternoon in January.

The window openings are drawn before the floor plan. This sounds backwards. In practice it means the rooms are organised around the few moments of usable winter light, and the rest of the plan settles itself around those moments.

Step three: model in cardboard, not the screen

Daylight simulation software is useful for compliance and almost useless for design. A 1:50 cardboard model held to the actual sky in the studio courtyard will tell you in thirty seconds what the screen tells you in three days. We still use the software. We do not trust it before we have held a model.

A drawing can lie about light. A cardboard model in a real window cannot.

Designing with daylight, not against it

Glæshus Tower passed its halfway pour last month. Twelve storeys are complete to the structural slab, and the curtain wall now reaches the seventh floor. We visited the site on a clear Tuesday and walked the building from the basement plant room to the roof.

The brushed brass mullions, installed in November on the south face, have begun to soften. The first patina is a warm grey-pink that the foundry warned us about but no sample could properly show. It is exactly what we wanted. The west face, installed in late January, is still bright. By midsummer the two faces will read as one.

The first of the stepped terraces poured on a cold morning in February. The geometry of the steps, set by our winter-sun studies eighteen months ago, will not be readable until the building is occupied, but standing on the pour we could already feel the angle of light it was made for.

Project update: Glæshus Tower

A junior architect joined us in October and within a week asked, politely, why we still keep four drawing boards in a studio of fifteen people. The boards are heavy. They take up floor space. The pencils need sharpening. It is a fair question and the answer is longer than I expected.

A pencil line takes about a second. A line in the model takes a tenth of that. The pencil is slow on purpose. It will not let you commit to a wall before you have looked at it. It will let you change your mind in the middle of a line. The model will not.

The drawing is for the building, not the client

We do not show the hand drawings to clients. They are the first conversation the project has with itself, and they belong to the studio. By the time a client sees a drawing it has usually been through six pencil iterations and three models. The pencil drawings are not deliverables. They are the building thinking out loud.

If you cannot draw it by hand, you do not yet understand it. If you can, you may begin in the model.

The junior architect has, since October, asked twice more whether the boards are worth the floor space. The second time was last week. She was at one of them, with a 4B pencil and a section through a stair, and the question was hypothetical.

Field notes, project updates, and slow essays from the studio.

On quiet architecture

Earlier entries

Designing with daylight, not against it

Project update: Glæshus Tower

Why we still draw by hand