News - Jamie Fobert Architects

On Wednesday 17 February at 6pm, Jamie will be talking about ‘Designing great art spaces for the twenty-first century’ as part of a series of online talks for the Friends of Kettle’s Yard.

Jamie will give an illustrated 45-minute talk about designing galleries and support spaces that anticipate current art practice and allow curators maximum freedom. He will include our work at Kettle’s Yard, Tate St Ives, the National Portrait Gallery, and more. There will be a chance for audience questions.

Find out more and book your tickets here

(Pictured: ‘Jennifer Lee: the Potter’s Space’ at Kettle’s Yard in 2019)

Jamie invited The Modern House into his Clerkenwell home, to tell them the story of its design, and talk about what it means to live in a modern way:

“Designing someone’s house, you have to be very careful not to make it sensational, because a home is where people have to wake up every morning, somewhere where they have to come home to, where they have to be on a rainy day, where they have to be when they’re feeling ill and where they celebrate and entertain.”

Read more and see the beautiful photographs here.

Pace Gallery have announced plans to open a new London gallery on Hanover Square in Autumn 2021. We are delighted that Pace has chosen Jamie Fobert Architects to design this 800m2 space.

We have very much enjoyed the challenge of re-configuring the premises at Hanover Square to provide Pace with excellent facilities for the display of changing exhibitions and to create a beautiful working environment for their staff. A complex of workspaces, including a library and viewing rooms, are centred around a new double-height void which allows daylight into the lower level work environment.

Our new work for Pace continues a a longstanding relationship; we designed their first London gallery on Lexington Street in 2011.

We are very excited to be supporting this year’s Accelerate programme, a design education and mentoring scheme developed by Open City in partnership with The Bartlett, which aims at widening diversity in the architecture industry.

We will be providing two mentors for sixth form school students from underrepresented backgrounds taking part in the programme. We hope that we might encourage and help these students prepare to study architecture at university.

To learn more about Open City’s Accelerate programme click here.

The Modern House has commissioned a lovely new set of photographs of Kander House, which is currently up for sale. See the listing and images here.

Kander House, a Victorian townhouse situated in London’s Primrose Hill is structured around a distinctive concrete figure, a compelling object in its own right, which also acts as structural support for the building. The garden was embraced as integral to the design of the main living space. It has made a wonderful family home for our clients for the past 15 years.

The house was awarded the 2007 RIBA London Award and shortlisted for both the Manser Medal and the Stephen Lawrence Prize. To learn more about the project click here.

Jamie contributes to Pamela Buxton’s article on how the Covid-19 pandemic has influenced and may affect museums and galleries, as they begin to open their doors once more to visitors. Topics from safety to funding and sustainability are discussed, along with some possible changes we can expect to see put in place moving forward.

Jamie comments that “The one positive thing that might happen is that when they [galleries and museums] do come back, people will appreciate the experience they offer all the more.”

Read the full article in The RIBA Journal.

We are very happy to have been appointed to the new Southwark Council architectural services framework; from a ‘fiercely competitive’ shortlist, we have been selected for ‘Education, social care and community projects’ over £10m.

The framework, administered by LHC, is open to any contracting authority in London. It intends to be an antidote to typical local authority frameworks, opening up public sector opportunities to ‘the best architectural practices able to deliver innovative construction services’. Certainly, the line-up of designers appointed is very impressive. We are proud to be among them and excited for the future opportunities offered.

Read more in the Architects’ Journal.

Jamie recalls fond memories of visiting Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in San Diego for the first time, when discussing buildings that we will look forward to seeing again after the coronavirus pandemic.

‘With its extraordinary setting and views, as well as its immense physical form, is the most powerful reminder of the importance of the direct encounter’.

Read Amanda Baillieu’s full article on Dezeen here.

We are very excited to be tasked with bringing a new Maggie’s Centre to Coventry, serving Warwickshire and the West Midlands.

Warm and welcoming and full of light and open space, Maggie’s Centres are designed by leading architects to be uplifting places for people with cancer and their families and friends. Professional staff at each centre offer free practical, emotional and social support.

Fundraising is currently underway to deliver the new centre at University Hospital Coventry. The project was launched publicly at Coventry Cathedral on 23 January.

Our project at Kettle’s Yard has been confirmed as a successful project in the 2020 Civic Trust Awards.

The redevelopment has enabled Kettle’s Yard to curate exhibitions with major artists from around the world and to display 20th and 21st century art in optimal gallery conditions. The high-quality visitor facilities enable even more people to enjoy this much-loved House and Gallery. And the new Learning Centre has transformed Kettle’s Yard’s work with children, young people and community groups.

Established in 1959, the Civic Trust Awards scheme identifies projects which exhibit strong sustainability credentials and a high level of accessible and universal design, and which have provided a positive civic contribution.

Jamie will lecture next Tuesday, the 15th of October, at 7pm at the University of Hertfordshire.

This is a collaborative event between the University and the Hertfordshire Association of Architects in which Jamie will speak about our projects which have been both, inspired by art and carefully designed to accommodate it.

You may find more information and book your free tickets here.

Photograph by Jim Stephenson.

Along with more than 600 other UK practices, we have signed up to Architects Declare.

This means that we are committed to:

— Evaluate all new projects against the aspiration to contribute positively to mitigating climate breakdown, and encourage our clients to adopt this approach.
— Upgrade existing buildings for extended use as a more carbon efficient alternative to demolition and new build whenever there is a viable choice.
— Include life cycle costing, whole life carbon modelling and post occupancy evaluation as part of our basic scope of work, to reduce both embodied and operational resource use.
— Collaborate with engineers, contractors and clients to further reduce construction waste.
— Accelerate the shift to low embodied carbon materials in all our work.
— Minimise wasteful use of resources in architecture and urban planning, both in quantum and in detail.

Please read more here.

Our working models and samples of the ceramics created for Tate St Ives will be exhibited as part of ‘Hand Held to Super Scale: Building with Ceramics’ at the Building Centre. The exhibition celebrates the resurgence of ceramics in contemporary architecture, showcasing newly completed projects, buildings still under construction, handmade items and classic examples of ceramics in architecture.

The faience-clad pavilion at Tate St Ives makes reference to the history of ceramic artists in St Ives. The extruded tiles were made by Agrob Buchtal with an ochre engobe and the beautiful blue-green glaze was produced and applied by Froyle Tiles. The tiles went through many iterations – several of which are on display here – to achieve a finish which captures the colour of the sea and sky.

‘Hand Held to Super Scale: Building with Ceramics’ is at The Building Centre from 20 September 2019 until 31 January 2020

Mon to Fri: 9.00am – 6.00pm
Sat: 10.00am – 5.00pm

The Building Centre, Store Street, London, WC1E 7BT

Kettle’s Yard is one of 54 new buildings – and one of 6 University of Cambridge buildings – to win an RIBA National Award 2019.

The RIBA National Awards recognise buildings which make a significant contribution to UK architecture. We are so pleased that Kettle’s Yard now joins Jamie Fobert Architects’s little rosta of projects which have received this accolade – Tate St Ives, Levring House, Luker House, Kander House and Anderson House.

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s foremost newspaper, has published a feature about Jamie.

Writer Katherine Ashenburg met with Jamie in our Shoreditch studio to learn about our projects, focusing on significant gallery projects for Kettle’s Yard, Tate St Ives and the National Portrait Gallery. She tells the story of Jamie’s journey from being a young student in Canada to an established architect in London:

“The lessons we learned in first year,” Fobert says, “are still some of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned: that
architecture should be unpretentious and it should be humane and it should be about the users and about improving their existence and their lives in ways that were beautiful.”

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On Wednesday 12th June at 6.30pm, Jamie will be talking about his approach to concrete specification and detailing as a part of Concrete Elegance.

Produced by The Concrete Centre and The Building Centre, this series of architectural lectures showcases the use of concrete to achieve elegant and innovative designs.

The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT

Wednesday 12th June, 6.30-8.45pm

For further information and to book, click here.

We are delighted that Kettle’s Yard is the winner of an RIBA East Award 2019, announced last night at the regional awards event in Cambridge.

The jury commented, ‘Jim Ede’s domestic museum, Kettle’s Yard, which was established in the 1950s and extended by Sir Leslie Martin in the late 60s, has been given an authentic and faithful enhancement through this careful and sensitive project. Rectangular gallery spaces, perfectly proportioned and laid out for international exhibitions, have been set into the random shape of the site with all its nooks and crannies. A deep coherence has been achieved within what had been a disparate collection of parts, and a very pleasing combination of rational and idiosyncratic architectural spaces has been created.’

This week, the Burlington Arcade celebrated its 200th anniversary.

But we wonder how many visitors who stroll through the arcade today realise that its striking stone floor is a very recent addition?

Built in 2016, the new floor was designed by Jamie Fobert Architects. The ambiguity – is it old? is it new? – is intentional. It does not compete with the Regency architecture, but responds sympathetically in terms of geometry, tonal variation and craftsmanship. We are delighted when visitors assume that it too has been there for 200 years.

Jamie sat down with Nick Carvell, Editor of The Jackal, as part of the magazine’s Citymakers portfolio to discuss architecture in the city, including the proposed new public space at the National Portrait Gallery:

“Public space is an integral part of what makes a city great – or not. Many of these places already exist, but what is important is how they are handled, how inviting they are, how open they are to having events, or to having people sit.”

This article is out now in the latest edition of The Jackal Magazine or you can listen to their conversation on the podcast by clicking here.

The first courtyard at Les Cours de BHV in Paris is complete.

In 2014 we began studying how timber paving could be introduced into our project to bring disused courtyards back into the public life of Paris. We considered various shapes and sizes of wood blocks and were drawn to the hexagon patterns but as the project was about a public route leading from one court to the next we began to introduce a chevron path of rectangular blocks that playfully lead you on your way.