Architecture in the Age of Likes 👍

With a priority of how to make our high streets and town centres thrive, Trevor Morriss posits whether re-energising areas with Instagram-friendly ‘moments’ is actually a question of viability, not vanity.

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Views inside The Music Box

After seven years at JLL, Morriss became a partner at Stanley Peach and Partners at the age of 30. Brought in as the future of the firm, with the existing partners reaching retirement age, Morriss in fact left before they did. He explains: ‘They weren’t doing commercial work at all; they were doing a lot of government work. So in terms of bedfellows, it probably didn’t work out quite as well. There’s no animosity.’ Out of Stanley Peach and Partners grew SPPARC in 2007.

The new company, spearheaded by Morriss, had already begun within the office but embodied a fresh, creative culture, thriving off of constant challenges and evolving design principals. Refusing to subscribe to a ‘house style’, Morriss explains how the practice takes a fresh and innovative approach to each project, recognising that no one context is the same. In that sense it could be said that its house style is to create an innovative and contextual response to each site. Even in cases where it has two projects on the same street they never look the same.

SPPARC has embraced the use of technology in all aspects of its work, but not to the detriment of alternative design methods and outcomes. ‘While we’re a modern firm we actually still do processes in quite a traditional way. I’ve still a workshop up on the top floor, so I still whittle around with bits of balsa wood. We still craft things and we still make things.’

The new home of LCCM with residential accommodation

The new home of LCCM with residential accommodation
Morris explains that all of the practice’s work involves an element of challenge. Whether it interrogates a brief to get the maximum out of it, or it is working within particularly complex site constraints, Morriss says: ‘We like to have these jigsaw puzzles, which we can unlock with the right challenges.’

Nowhere is this more evident than in The Music Box. Recently opening to become the new home for the London College of Creative Media (LCCM) in Southwark, The Music Box involved an infinitely complicated brief, with a residential development above a music college.

The structure consists of ‘floating rooms within rooms’, using freestanding steel installations to avoid sound transfer between the units. This differentiation is expressed in the materiality, defining the border between residential and college with a horizontal line modelled on Phi’s Golden Section. The music college forms a rigid brick base, and the residential block ethereally rests on top.
Morriss is positive on the future of small architecture firms such as SPPARC. He concludes: ‘I think that the spirit of a collaborative practice our kind of size is more relevant now than it’s ever been… people have never been more tuned in to really good quality design than they are now. I think that they’re actually genuinely interested in it, when maybe 20 years ago they weren’t…the place of the architect is probably more relevant now than it’s ever been.’