Research
Metropolitan Workshop has committed to a programme of practice-based research aimed at capturing and communicating our practice expertise and reflecting on it with a variety of voices to promote innovation and enhance our creative endeavour.
We will select a major research theme annually, driven by our practice imperatives and our collaborators. Like everything else we do as a studio, our research process will be tailored to the specific issues at hand and encourage collaboration.
Each research project will begin with an issue of Prospects, a set of proposition papers that will constructively challenge our thinking, and planned events to capture debate within practice and refine our analysis.
Our research projects will end with an addendum Prospects, which will capture new knowledge from participating -practitioners, present new reflection and analysis on our past and current practice, and critically propose new ways of thinking that will enrich our future practice with collaborators.
People Powered Places: Practical Guide
Metropolitan Workshop was founded as a vehicle for productive collaboration. We have always valued working with existing communities, and see their stories and aspirations about the past, present and future of the places in which they live and work as integral to forming a meaningful brief, testing and developing proposals, and assessing the success of […]. Read more.
People Powered Places
Metropolitan Workshop was founded as a vehicle for productive collaboration. We have always valued working with existing communities, and see their stories and aspirations about the past, present and future of the places in which they live and work as integral to forming a meaningful brief, testing and developing proposals, and assessing the success of […]. Read more.
A New Kind of Suburbia
Metropolitan Workshop has been thinking critically about how innovative forms of suburban housing and neighbourhoods can enhance sociability and liveability since our inception in 2005. So, when we launched our practice-based research programme in 2019, selecting suburbia as our first annual research theme felt like a natural point of departure. A New Kind of Suburbia […]. Read more.
NLA Ideas for Housing London
Pocket Regen has been shortlisted as one of 100 ideas that will be on display in a free public exhibition in The Building Centre from 15 Oct to 17 Dec, examining London’s housing crisis. Working with Pocket Living, Pocket Regen presents an alternative estate regeneration strategy, that provides a better offer to existing residents, and other stakeholders, than the received logic of demolish and rebuild. The intention is that the new model utilises a bottom-up approach to estate regeneration, offering residents compelling incentives and choice. Key to the idea’s success will be the ‘alignment of incentives’ across all key stakeholders – Residents, LA, GLA, etc. Read more.
12 Year Anniversary Book
12 years ago we set out to practice architecture differently. We wanted to make more useful, more beautiful, more inspiring buildings and places, but to do this we knew that we had to find a better process that harnessed the full spectrum of society’s talent. We could see that there needed to be greater recognition of the power of collaboration and creative exchange in the design process and that this needed to change before architecture and urbanism could evolve. Read more.