INTERVIEW: James Pockson, IDK Architects
Recently, we’ve been working with architects IDK on an intriguing retreat for wellness, contemplation and a touch of ‘escape’. This unique retreat is located on the site of the former Millom Ironworks, which is situated on the edge of the Lake District. The retreat will consist of various structures, including uniquely designed eco-roundhouses, sustainably built community spaces and sculptural centrepieces.
The project is the result of extensive design process, to incorporate wellbeing practices, the rugged post-industrial setting and an intent for the building to achieve the highest level of BREEAM accreditation. They’ve given us the kind of drawings and designs we relish - unique, challenging and innovative!
IDK operates between Paris and London, so we were grateful to have a quick catch up with architect and partner, James Pockson. He explained to us how their practice grew in 2020 and we were happy to meet one of their new team members, who kindly made us a stunning a little rice bowl for lunch. It was so pretty, we had to take a snap. Thanks IDK!
We also found out more about their new office space, and how they see things panning out for the future.
GA: James, have you been working from home in 2020, and if so, what have you found to be the positives and negatives?
Working from home is nothing new to IDK: we started life as a “cloud company”. When we set out we had two critical issues to resolve. First, how does a design-led small practice establish itself in a financially sustainable manner? Second, how can we run a partnership between two capital cities (Paris / London) who’s commercial price per square foot is some of the most unaffordable in the world? The answer was somewhat obvious to us - don't bother with the office! So when lockdown one hit and the world took a step change in working methods, we really didn’t have to adapt - we just kept our heads down. A cloud company is great, not because it is overhead efficient, but because we can work from wherever is best. However, lock down did not permit this - we became locked in.
The hardest part of one’s working world becoming the size of one’s London flat is maintaining separation and, for a somewhat obsessive architect, walking away from the work.
Being in that room, on average 12-18 hours in a day, I began to take more care in trying to complete it as a piece of design. Now, I am so proud of my workspace. It feels very special (and peculiar) to me. It’s also the product of a collaboration with a furniture maker, Tom Clowney, and a symbol of how I try to design most things, through collaboration. I am happy to be in it every day. It makes me smile. Being stuck in one place made me, take more pride in the space I now live and work in, and invest energy into the space, in the same manner I would for my clients. Tidying up became an important ritual - perhaps the commute was replaced with this. The moment where you line everything back up and chuck stuff in the bin, turn stuff on or off. This phase change became a critical ritual - it's common to all of us and we should notice it more perhaps. Switching off, as switching off.
Perhaps that is something that the information economy has lost from the factory model - the clock in and clock out, the hard stop to the day. If left unchecked, I would probably just work myself into the ground: my worst trait. Efficiency, replaced with a self imposed lonely, perpetuity. Thank goodness for Eva, my partner, she makes me snap out of it!
That’s a danger of the new normal, of working from home - that ability for temporal and energetic drift.
GA: Have you or your company made any significant changes already to your office set-up?
We feel very fortunate at IDK to have grown this year.
Against all the odds we have taken on a handful of wonderful collaborators. In doing this, it felt wrong to keep hiding in the cloud.
So, we have taken a small studio in Iliffe Yard in South East London. Iliffe yard was constructed at a time when London had a much more nuanced attitude towards home/work. Iliffe is a long gated yard that is flanked by double storeys of small workshops and studios. These workspaces are wrapped at the perimeter by tenement housing. The roofs of the workspaces form long roof gardens for the homes - its a fascinating model that merits closer study. This closer connection between life and work used to proliferate throughout London. Much of it is now lost - either to the Blitz or the more subtle ravages of modernist planning, that lobotomised, spatially and legally, the spaces of work and the spaces of home in the city.
Iliffe Yard
At Iliffe Yard, we don’t have a conventional office. We see it like a “workshop” - a place where creativity can happen. Where resources and expertise can be accessed in a safe and planned way. Not a place to trudge to on some arbitrary diurnal rhythm to do work! No thanks! We have a policy, where if you need to come in to collaborate, to make, or for a change of scene then do! But if you don’t, then don’t! The little workshop on some days becomes a pub, other days a barn, others a community space, others a forum to discuss conservation, others a little speak-easy and so on.
No one has “their” seat - the boss doesn't sit “there” - the sooner we disinherit that hangover of surveillance factory planning, the better.
GA: How do you foresee your office of the future?
Well I think of this from an urban perspective. In London, for example, I'm interested in a few things. One, how the coming changes to the use class order, and the recent domestic-conversion review can be leveraged by groups of developers, architects and local authorities as a force for good in the city. Its up to designers, developers and council clients to ensure that the high street of tomorrow has a new and different kind of vibrancy, one where skills, local specificity, services, trades and crafts proliferate. Part of that mix I feel will be “third spaces” - places where distributed work can happen more locally to, but separate from the home. Second, I think we should bring more housing back into the centre of London - with large swathes of office blocks that will no longer be necessary, it is high time to consider new kinds of conversion and sustainable retrofit.
Perhaps we could look to precedents like Iliffe Yard and bring work and home closer together again.
There is an opportunity within this new normal to create a healthier, happier, more inclusive and more nuanced city, when the commercial edifices that already seem old-hat are modulated, adapted to new and diverse use.
It’s been a hellish year - but I’m optimistic about the future.