Architects: portraits of a practice

In: Expertise

Abstract

"This book portrays the lives and work of 10 architects who comprise the Millar Howard Workshop architectural firm based in the Cotswolds in the United Kingdom. Focusing on their activities and their work environment, Yarrow's book is narrative driven, full of stories of anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict and its resolution, and the many personal commitments that propel the acts of creativity essential to good architecture and design. Taking up recent calls to "personalise the expert," the book contains insights into architectural and design practice, situating these in relation to broader themes including creativity, ethical self-formation and organisational practice. Through ethnographic descriptions of everyday working life, the book reveals the complex and contradictory imperatives that shape architectural design, and highlights the negotiations involved in efforts to resolve these. These accounts demonstrate how ideas are imaginatively produced through shifting configurations of people, materials, tools and places. Rather than deconstructing understandings of creative individuality, the account traces how this is understood and enacted through practices that are shaped by, even as they question the ideal"--