What was ‘In Common’ at the London Festival of Architecture 2023?

Summer has arrived in London, with days upon days of hot sticky weather. Despite it being the festival season, it’s been hard to get the celebratory spirit going. Rising interest rates are getting the capital’s owners and renters in a sweat, and weeks of school, hospital and train strikes are wearing on, making disruption the norm. London Festival of Architecture (1-30 June) is attempting to hit an optimistic note with its 2023 theme ‘In Common’. Interpretations of this uniting theme are scattered across London in the form of talks, installations, exhibitions, and events: from conversations in pubs and over intimate dinners to some of the city’s grandest institutions.

Hidden down a passageway near Fenchurch Street is Urban Playground by McCloy + Muchemwa, a small landscape of genuine delight that punctures the serious financial district of the city with the chaos of children playing. The series of structures in cork, mirror and blue linoleum was every bit as joyful as you’d want it to be. Cleverly carved niches made space for sitting, climbing, play and exploration, some only sized for small children to inhabit.

Stumble, trip! – a conversation about children and the city at Elephant and Castle’s Rosy Hue pub on 21 June, organised by London Communications Agency, seemed to confirm that the playful city is having a moment, not just in London, but worldwide. The idea of the city as a place only for adults or professionals to roam is overdue for re-examination. It’s encouraging to see very young are increasingly valued as stakeholders in the urban environment, but a shame that teenagers are still routinely forgotten when it comes to places of belonging in the city.

More positive evidence of the profession expanding its view comes in the form of The Architect has Left the Building, a film installation at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Created by Jim Stephenson, celebrated photographer and documenter of the UK’s most celebrated buildings over the past 15 years, it presents an alternative to the pristine and largely lifeless photographs commonly used in the architectural press. The film looks at how buildings by Jamie Fobert, Henley Halebrown, Grafton Architects, Carmody Groarke and others are inhabited every day, questioning why post-occupancy is not often considered in how we celebrate and evaluate architecture. How great would it be if buildings only won awards after considering how effective they are in use, rather than how they look through a photographer’s professional lens?

Earlier in the month RIBA Gold Medal 2023 winner and humanitarian architect Yasmeen Lari gave a keynote speech at the Ecocity World Summit on the theme of climate-resilient community architecture. The high-profile three-day event focused on urban change began in Berkeley, California in 2009. It made its first appearance in London this summer, after previous events spread across five continents including stops in Bangalore, Nantes, Vancouver, Shenzhen and Adelaide. Compared to London Design Festival which has its Global Design Forum thought-leadership centrepiece, London Festival of Architecture’s star debates are more dispersed – perhaps there’s an opening for a homegrown event to take up the mantle next year.

At the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, architects’ favourite Peter Barber curated a room-themed ‘making is thinking’ – reflecting on the role of craft in building design. Fresh after the criticism levelled at the Venice Architecture Biennale for ‘not showing any architecture’, this room doubled down on the importance of the small-scale and handmade versus the corporate and commercial. It’s a hive of material tests, prototypes and built fragments rather than presentation models, a celebration of human work rather than digital. Two towering elements by the late artist Phyllida Barlow steal the attention in this green-painted room – a stack of oversize pebbles and a curious hybrid of tree and truss.

With a full month’s worth of events, the festival has a thriving fringe too. Across the city, in open studios and through panel discussions, the theme of In Common was being dissected and interpreted in all manner of ways. At the weirder end was Come. Sit. Eat My Flesh, a performance and installation by Studio Syn. Guests at the dinner on 22 June wore skin and blood-coloured tones, picking on a part-edible part-sculptural map of ‘imagined London’ considering architecture as a common body with three parts – ‘material, immaterial and not yet materialised’.

The event proved there is still space for the experimental and expansive in this city, despite a prevailing feeling that London is losing its creative crown to more affordable places. It’s difficult to draw conclusions from this sprawling architecture festival of many parts – it does not have, nor aims to have, the clear direction or curation of a biennale. Its wider reach gives the opportunity to include more voices in conversations that have traditionally excluded – such as Manifestos, for example. The talk at the Design Museum on 24 June, saw Jos Boys, Ruth Lang, Shahed Saleem and Dr Neal Shasore introduce lesser-known creatives working on strategies for inclusive placemaking. Pews and Perches, a LFA and Royal Docks competition to design a piece of temporary public seating, was a glance at what could manifest from more collaborative attitudes to city-making. Architecture and design students worked with manufacturers to create a range of unusual pieces. Turning Tide, a dynamic piece by Mvuu, Odace Engineering and ZedWorks reflected on the function of the Thames Barrier flood control mechanism and our fragile hold on nature. 

The best responses to ‘In Common’ were about theme of resistance, of upholding everyday realness over vanity and ego. Now the festival’s ending, we need that attitude to go further in making the city a better place to be.