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/