‘British comedy has shaped the way I understand design’

Despite the extraordinary things happening in our industry in the past two decades, the role of architects in generating only detached vanity projects for the wealthy, framed along neoliberal lines, remains the overwhelming image in the eyes of the public.

Take, for example, housing secretary Robert Jenrick recently saying that ‘the built environment shouldn’t be something that is imposed upon local communities, it shouldn’t just be something which is the dream of an architect or what is fashionable to a certain type of person’. These soundbites play well with a populist anti-expert agenda but do not reflect the aspirations or lived experiences of many in the profession, certainly not the emerging generation of practitioners I see all around me.

In recent years we have seen a flourishing of new ‘people-focused’ spatial design courses, movements and practices centred around exploring collective agency in the built environment. This, combined with the looming threat of planning reforms that look likely to have widespread and quite unpredictable impacts on how the built environment is produced, makes it urgent that the ambitions and achievements of these new forms of practice should be exposed more in mainstream media in order to raise people’s awareness. We need to celebrate the social purpose of architecture and spatial agency, while also expanding the definition of who gets to do it and who is seen to be doing it.

This winter I wrote a pilot show for TV, provisionally called Placemakers. The story follows three young women designers from diverse backgrounds trying to make meaningful social change in their area. The story centres on three women who graduated from a fictional ‘Architecture and Narrative Environments’ course and set out on a collective journey of making their neighbourhoods better places. Despite their shared training, values and care for placemaking, they come from different contexts, cultures and backgrounds. These differences make their work compelling and enables them to relate to people across society, while simultaneously creating clashes and doubts between themselves. The three share an anxiety that, somehow by being young women and of mixed backgrounds, they have to work harder to be taken seriously, and this fear manifests itself differently in each character.

When I was choosing whether to study in Delft or London, having been brought up in Portugal, the London that I saw in British TV comedy won. British comedy’s capacity to explore the everyday lives of real(ish) people and find humour in our social weirdnesses and oddities is one of its greatest strengths – whether that’s the surrealism of Monty Python, the bleak everyday of paper sales seen in The Office or the delicate social interactions, hobbyism and connection to the rural landscape of The Detectorists. Once here, and living in Shoreditch, I quickly found myself an extra (not literally) in Nathan Barley, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s viciously precise comedy about hipster culture. Existing in and around comedies like these has shaped the way I understand and design for the people around me.

The characters in Placemakers approach their social purpose and creativity with the same obsessiveness as the characters of The Detectorists. Their behaviour often risks making them appear like a Nathan Barley character, though, ultimately, I hope we’ll see them making progress and achieving, in small or large ways, some of the outcomes they set out to.

Lately procurement routes, such as those designed by the Greater London Authority, have taken some steps to encourage larger organisations to support ‘emerging’ talent, but quite often the invitations are patronising and restrictive. Young voices remain hugely underrepresented in our industry. Placemakers aims to celebrate that youthful, at times naïve, spirit, coupled with the professional ethos of these designers. It describes the tensions between working on projects that align with one’s values and principles, and the realities of the struggle of making a living with design tools.

In demystifying role models and finding humour and pathos in their experiences, it hopes to support emerging generations of architects as they find their professional identities.

Cristina Monteiro is an architect with particular expertise in heritage and conservation, a researcher and a founding co-director of DK-CM