01 about
:nhab:t Architects Studio is a Chartered practice of award-winning architects, with near 25 years experience in providing original design solutions to clients' requirements.
2012 - 2024 I 12 years ago we wanted to start an architecture practice that would embrace a thinker-doer approach of 'research in order to implement' - looking to understand before doing, and looking to understand in order to do! Three leap-years later and the vision is just as strong with new projects on the drawing board, and a passion for design where a holistic view to architecture, and the impact of the design on day-to-day lives, drives each design.
Throughout the process of any project, we engage fully to ensure that the steps of the project are enjoyable. In addition, sustainability has been high on our agenda since before it was popular phrase, and we look to off information on integration of these features - drawing from projects we worked on that got the highest BREEAM Green Star rating at the time.
Our professional niche is bespoke residential family homes. Buildings are, however, about context, and we bring to the process of design resolution a wide range of professional experience that situates these individual design solutions. This wider experience includes, residential and commercial architecture, urban design and masterplanning, schools, gyms and conservation architecture on a series of projects including larger scale projects in The Millennium Dome Masterplan, UK Home Office, and Dover Castle visitors' approach, as well as more intimate buildings in The Green Building (Sustainability award), The Pearson Conservatory (ECIA & SAIA merit awards).
02 portfolio
03 research
Our research into upgrading informal settlements in South Africa has, through PhD level interrogation, produced the Shack Urbanity Intervention Tool (SUIT) to assist all invested actors of change in the process of upgrading areas of Shack Urbanity. There is further information in the book, 'Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa' (2016, UCT Press) to which we contributed chapter-to-book, titled, 'Visualising Process and the Actors of Change' (p.246 - 260). Below are the infographics of this process of 'intervention forensics' referred to in the book.
The SUIT is currently being tested for its applicability for working towards implementing the #NewUrbanAgenda, the mandate that came from UN Habitat III
:nhab:t was invited to attend the UN-Habitat World Urban Forum 9 in Kuala Lumpur, supported by London Metropolitan University.
We continue this research as we head towards UN-Habitat World Urban Forum 12, implementing the 'thinker-doer' approach to architecture that started the practice 12 years ago in 2012.
Further research will table ideas of wider spread use and impact in the Global South.
The SUIT has now been developed into a web-based application.