Leaving London

LiPeng Law

It seems recessions precipitate great movements of people; it feels as if a mass exodus of London is occurring with many of my friends amongst those leaving. Lipeng Law is one of those; she and her partner are going to Peru to take part in a hands on re-building project. We meet at Dalston’s Arcola, a favourite haunt for both of us. The café has the rough charm of a much loved community space, its painted brick walls are covered with postings about recent approaching events. We sit on a well worn, tan leather sofa and begin our conversation.

Having worked here for several years, Lipeng chose to take voluntary redundancy in June. Her office was going through a redundancy excercise and not having been too happy in her job, when the opportunity came, she took it. Had she been thinking that she might leave for a while? She says it may have been a ‘latent’, ‘deeply buried’ thing. ‘I was unhappy but not entirely sure what about.’ The redundancy exercise, she says, made her question a lot of things and ultimately whether she really wanted to work in a large commercial practice. ‘Of course there were questions like is this the best time to stop work?’ But at the end of it she chose to be ‘happier.’ So for her leaving was a proactive thing she had decided ‘not to wait for a letter to arrive’. But having left without an explicit plan, how did she cope in the immediate aftermath of loosing the certainty a job brings?

After a week or so the reality started to sink in and she realised she needed to make plans. The current decision to leave London for Peru came out of this process. Her partner, also an architect, had been made redundant too. Their initial decision was governed by the London job market. ‘It seemed there would be few ‘good work opportunities’ and those there are, are chased by a large volumes of people. ‘So we thought how could make use of this time to enrich our experience as architects; as people who are interested in design’. They decided to look for ‘the kind of experience a commercial practice could not offer, a rather more hands on experience a kind of learning opportunity. We thought it could be a good chance for us to learn about how people build, not how we work learn from schools or offices but actually learning more about how you build with local materials; really down to the bare necessities of what architecture really means to certain people. There was no opportunity cost at this point.’

'we asked, how can we make use of this time to enrich our experience as architects, as people who are interested in design?'

‘It was’, she says ‘like an adventure, we sat down and thought if we could do anything now what would we do?’ This is for many a dream question and to be able to furnish it with a feasible answer is quite a luxury. What they have decided to do is travel, despite not having jobs they ‘do not want to stop learning’. They want their travels to be more than a holiday but rather quite directed and they want to do ‘good things’, community related work.

‘We started looking for places we could live cheaply and volunteer and make use of what we have accumulated our school and work experience. Hopefully we can contribute what we know but also learn from, what might be, much better indigenous solutions’. What they are hoping to achieve is an educational ‘exchange’.

It seems that for Lipeng, the world has literally opened up. She has become part of a huge outflow of ideas, training and experience. ‘We’, she says, ‘were not restricted by anything’, there were ‘no geographical’ boundaries. ‘After months of searching we finally found an organisation in Pisco, four hours outside Lima, Peru. The town was destroyed by an earthquake about two years ago and there is a local organisation whose focus is on rebuilding the stricken areas. We are going for a couple of months to see where it leads us and what we can do.’

I wondered what her criteria were when searching for a project, beyond it being construction related and the opportunity to learn? She says it was quite a task, initially, to find construction related programmes, ‘most are medical and teaching’. But eventually they found there are quite a number doing humanities work. Beyond that, they were concerned with the organisations, set up; they were keen to find organisations that did not treat [volunteering] as a ‘holiday package’.

It strikes me that this will be a positive thing for the architecture profession, in the long run. The release of skills not required here must be good for the projects they help in other countries, particularly if people are willing to participate in bottom up programmes, in the way Lipeng is. But perhaps more interesting is what might be brought back. She may not return, London may have lost her, but others doing similar things will and thus there might truly be an international ‘exchange’ of architectural thought and physical experience, more so than occurs in less tumultuous times.

I ask about the wider implications for her future practice as an architect, how does she think her ‘adventure’ will feed back into this? ‘First and foremost’ she thinks ‘it will be amazing to learn how people build contextually. And what about that relationship with commercial practice, where she has come from? ‘Design is a very elitist [practice] in some ways’ it is almost as though it is a ‘luxury’ but, she thinks ‘that architecture especially if it affects the way people live has a much more importance than a luxury item. Everyone should be able to afford good architecture, not necessarily ‘star’ designed architecture’. And she thinks this journey may be a way to find out how to make good, inexpensive architecture that can change people’s lives.

Follow Lipeng's progress in Peru:

http://shiokwave.wordpress.com/

A Picture For A Story

James Whitaker

It’s a breezy, near autumn, day along the River Thames and I’m heading to meet James Whitaker at the Festival Hall; five months ago James was working for a prominent design studio in London, where he’d worked for two and a half years. Now, after being made redundant, he is a freelance photographer. His current project is to record in pictures other architectural professionals who have been through redundancy and are now doing other things. As part of this he is going to photograph me, by the river, which is the site of a film I have been working on this year, and I and will interview him; a picture for a story, it seems a fair exchange:

The festival hall bustles with people, mainly tourists I suppose, and in here amongst it all one could forget there is a recession happening. We seek a comfy spot, conducive to conversation, find some sofa like creations near the bar at the back of the foyer and with afternoon life continuing around us begin talking.

Most redundancies are precipitated by sudden changes or unfortunate combinations of circumstances, decisions made by clients, remotely, which then have a ripple effect that is felt by individuals. James had been working on a development in the middle-east which was put on hold; the determining factor in this case had been politics. Combined with the loss of other projects in the practice it meant that, as if in a rather high stakes game of musical chairs, ‘when the music stopped’ he was ‘caught without a chair’.

For a practice having to loose staff who may have been committed to them for a long time is tough - there is no easy way of delivering or receiving redundancy news. James takes a pragmatic view of the circumstances, feeling that for employers making these decisions and delivering the news can’t be easy. ‘It’s possibly harder for a boss to lay folk off than it is being laid off. For me It was a brilliant job, something I really enjoyed doing but it was a job and one day I’ll have another job. Whereas my boss was having to get rid of some prized talents and skills’.
He is philosophical about his own situation. ‘I figured worse things happen at sea; we’d already had a set of redundancies and when my time came I started looking around the office at people of a similar level and realised that either I would be going or a friend would. There is no particular happy solution to it.

‘It seems that redundancy has this liberating effect on people’

In some ways I’m quite pleased at the opportunity to go out and have another adventure. I had been starting to feel a little bit stagnant at work. Maybe they picked up on that’. Did he, I wondered, have an immediate sense of this? Did it feel like a possible adventure from day one? He says possible redundancies were declared on the Friday and that by the end of the weekend he had already decided to set out as a freelance photographer. This palpable sense of optimism seems to have framed his approach to the whole business of being redundant.

By midweek he was already considering photography seriously. 'I didn’t know where the clients would come from or how the logistics would work but knew I wanted to seize the opportunity and have a go'.

The first thing was to try and reduce outgoings to a bare minimum. He talks about ‘stretching’ money and therefore and giving himself ‘a little bit more time to chase the dream’. There were dramatic changes in his living circumstances, for example he decided to downsize. Making these changes has created a chance to realise a new year’s resolution. ‘For the last two years I’ve made the resolution that this year I want to earn some money from a photo. I always thought that it would be great to have someone think highly enough of a photo to want to pay money for it’.

But it can’t be this simple? One can follow dreams but the thorny issue of survival? ‘This has been tricky’. His reaction was swift he sought advice from friends who are professionals in the field and through this connection landed his first client. However despite the advice, it still seemed 'a bit of a black art'. Though the connection did yield his first job, for Oxford University. Since then it seems to have been a matter of being proactive, creating self initiated projects-one of which is the ‘after redundancy’ project.

‘It all kind of started’, he says, as all the best ideas do, ‘in the pub. I‘d been talking to a friend and started to realise the diversity of people’s responses to the recession. When people apply to university in the first place there is this real idea someone who studied who studied French and German at A level is going to be just as good as someone who studied maths and physics’. Architecture it seems is a receptacle for people with a diverse range of skills, James describes it as a ‘melting pot’ of ‘people from different backgrounds’ the diversity he says ‘gives the strength to the course’. The course indeed pulls disparate people in and channels them into this application and the job then it would seem normalises people. ‘They study away for six years and come out [into] very similar jobs and it doesn’t matter whether they are working on the next Opera house or and extension, you’re still drawing the same details in AutoCAD day in day out’.

'you can’t help but wonder how amazing, interesting and diverse our profession would be if people where allowed to use these skills in their day to day work'

‘It seems’ he says ‘that redundancy has this liberating effect on people’. Indeed it does seem that the applied force of this economic situation has released from the box of office based life a plethora of suppressed and underused skills. ‘People’, says James, ‘have been given the opportunity to go back to what they really like. [They] have their little niches that they felt passionate about before that drove their projects through university and all of a sudden they are being allowed to return to these things’. I think ‘allowed’ is an interesting choice of words it is as though recessions give people permission, little chinks of light, or rather time out of the light where they can explore. For him the niche is photography, which he sees as symbiotic with his work as an architect. ‘ I always think all the skills one learns as an architect influence how you work as a photographer and hopefully vice-versa; things like having an appreciation of how the light falls through a space, or the story and meaning of a space; all these things you learn to read as an architect, it becomes quite easy to portray those in a photograph. Knowing that makes it intuitive as a photographer to be able to see how to represent a space or an object’.

His portraits for ‘after redundancy’ are like a collage of people and skills.
‘I’ve met people from every spectrum of life who’ve gone out and found their little passions and are trying to create some sort of enterprise. It’s just terrific to see all these people getting released and you can’t help but wonder how amazing, interesting and diverse our profession would be if people where allowed to use these diverse skills in their day to day work’.


What then of his own return to architecture? ‘I ‘m not entirely sure how I feel but I do want to return on my own terms’. Is this possible? Can the profession really accommodate this? ‘The place I used to work was and still is terrific but at the same time their ethos sometimes jarred with my own. But then I look at places which align closer to my own ethics and they don’t excite me. I am quite excited by the idea that it doesn’t ever have to be one or the other. He cites pluralist Eames; furniture designer, filmmaker, architect and I optimistically contribute Corbusier. ‘There is no rule that says you’ve got to be one thing or the other. I’m excited by the idea of being able to forge a way through the world doing many things and hopefully one thing feeding into the other’. Is this a common thing that these liberated architect’s may return on their on terms? He thinks there is a fifty-fifty split of people just doing things as a stopgap and the rest have used it as real opportunity to reassess. It seems he, like me, is optimistic about what the recession may ultimately mean for the future of the profession.

To come:

Lipeng Law on Leaving London

Sam Potts on RARA

(Redundant Architect's Recreational Association)

And more...