Reference: IDLE018
Title: PIVOT Studio
Date: 2018
Author: Ian Campbell and Jack Idle, PIVOT Studio
Details: A Brighton based architectural practice.
Media: Website
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: We are a team of two, with a growing base of collaborators who help to deliver and enrich our projects. After graduating together from the founding cohort of the LSA, we worked together at Clive Sall Architecture for a year before starting our practice. We have carried out a wide variety of projects ranging from a garden office for a private client to masterplan scale feasibility studies for local authorities and major landlords. To date, we have enjoyed learning the harsh commercial realities and rewarding experiences of delivering small scale residential projects along with an ongoing relationship with the startup property developer Skyroom. Our early stage site discovery and feasibility studies for rooftop developments with Skyroom offer us the opportunity to continue more critical discussion of architecture and the city started at the LSA.

Our projects do not follow a house style but rather aim to align with a set of values: humility, professionalism (or responsibility), elegant simplicity and holistic sustainability. Given our experience, our projects have been limited in scale or scope, but our values have always underpinned the direction which we aspire to in our work.

Each project we work on allows us to learn about a client and a place, it allows us to grow our understanding of the built environment and how people use and relate to buildings. We believe in honesty and transparency with our clients and often start our projects with a string of simple questions: Where is it? Who is it for? What is it for? What will it cost? What is an elegant solution to your requirements? An ideal project for us works towards an understanding of a place and a relationship of mutual trust and understanding between ourselves and the client.

Reference: IDLE019
Title: PIVOT Cities
Date: 2021
Author: Ian Campbell and Jack Idle, PIVOT Studio
Details: PIVOT Cities is an experimental online platform for architectural education which enhances existing university programmes and project briefs.
Media: Website
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: PIVOT Cities was born from our interest in tutoring and mentoring architecture students. Like many architecture graduates, we returned to university to help out as guest critics and lead student workshops alongside working in practice. As project commitments grew, we explored connecting with academia in a different way, and started offering tutoring and mentoring services online. Seeing the unique value of online interaction which could be scheduled flexibly with students near and far, PIVOT Cities evolved into a platform which aims to grow and connect more architecture students with experienced graduates working in the built environment.

Reference: IDLE04
Title: West Library Assembly
Date: 2014
Author: Jack Idle
Details: The proposal is to generate a connector linking the West Library to the Meltdown Bar, along Caledonian Road, in North London.
Media: Image
Credit: presidentsmedals.com/west-library-assembly

Description: The connection aims to link the existing structures of these two buildings and re-program the interiors, creating relationships between the current programs. The act of unifying such established buildings will generate a landmark. However, tailoring the landmark so that it responds sensitively to the existing buildings’ poses considerable challenge.

The overall aim of the proposal is to create a social interface, embedded in the community through the existing buildings and programs, but with a ‘unified heart’; which acts as a catalyst to connect the diverse social groups of Caledonian Road.

Reference: IDLE007
Title: ED/GY - Ethical Dwellings for Generation Y
Date: 2016
Author: Phoebe Nickols and Jack Idle
Details: A think tank to tackle the city’s housing crisis.
Media: Publication
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: Our think tank is concerned with the agency of the architect: using our agency as spatial thinkers we have formed an organisation: ED/GY - Ethical Dwellings for Generation Y - to tackle the city’s housing crisis.

Reference: IDLE008
Title: Vibrant Natures
Author: Jack Idle
Details: A Primer for Integrating Nature Into the City with Architecture as the Tool
Date: 2017
Media: Publication
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: The agenda of Vibrant Nature is to pursue nature’s integration into the city through architecture. The disconnect between humanity and nature has reached a critical point of reflection through modernity. Our role as architects in the 21st century must be to build new connections between the natural and the urban. This will require redefining environmentalism and sustainability not as a practical or technical pursuit devoid of the poetic, but instead designing in collaboration with nature.

Reference: IDLE010
Title: Larden Road
Date: 2018
Author: Ian Campbell and Jack Idle, PIVOT Studio
Details: Strategic definition, Preparation and Brief
Media: Image
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: This feasibility study project explored the redevelopment of a Housing Association site in West London through change of use and rooftop extension. Additional homes at rooftop level and in place of underused commercial and retail units at ground floor unlock a new community centre and a landscaping strategy throughout the site.

Reference: IDLE011
Title: Supported Living Homes
Date: 2019
Author: Ian Campbell and Jack Idle, PIVOT Studio
Details: Concept Design, Planning application
Media: Image
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: A series of planning application projects for Supported Living Homes, whose business model focuses on delivering affordable supported living flats through the change of use and extension of underused commercial buildings.

Reference: IDLE014
Title: George Nakashima
Date: NA
Author: NA
Details: Architect George Nakashima
Media: Photographs
Credit: nakashimawoodworkers.com

Description: The artefacts, texts, and tools that I have chosen are always changing but I think the theme among them is a gentleness. Aalto sensitively attuned his architecture to respond to its natural environment as Marie-José attunes her architecture to the city. I like to move in the opposite direction to many, my interest has been on small projects which are well crafted and have a sensibility to where they are situated. I am still very early in my career and haven't had the opportunity to pursue the level of craft achieved in some of my influences, but I'm heading towards it one project at a time.

Reference: IDLE015
Title: Marie-José Van Hee
Date: NA
Author: NA
Details: Architect Marie-José Van Hee
Media: Photographs
Credit: mjvanhee.be

Description: Marie-José Van Hee is one of my favourite contemporary architects, there is a quiet complexity to her work that is really hard to achieve. She turns a home into a piece of city with rhythmic street frontages, intimate courtyards and colonnades.

Reference: IDLE016
Title: Alvar and Aino Aalto
Date: NA
Author: NA
Details: Architects Alvar and Aino Aalto
Media: Photographs
Credit: vam.ac.uk/articles/alvar-aalto-andaino-aalto

Description: Alvar and Aino Aalto, my architectural and design heroes. I’ve visited most of their projects in Finland and each one has had a profound effect on me, their sensitivity and boundless creativity is timeless.

Reference: IDLE034
Title: Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
Date: 1973
Author: Ernst Friedrich Schumacher
Details: Overlapping environmental, social, and economic forces such as the 1973 energy crisis and popularisation of the concept of globalisation helped bring Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful critiques of mainstream economics to a wider audience during the 1970s.
Credit: wikipedia.org/Small_Is_Beautiful

Description: “We can say that man’s management of the land must be primarily oriented towards three goals - health, beauty and permanence. The fourth goal - the only one accepted by experts - productivity, will then be attained almost as a by-product.”

Reference: IDLE022
Title: Sketchbook
Date: 2021
Author: Jack Idle
Details: Sketchbook pages
Media: Stationary
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: I use my sketchbook everyday to quickly get a design idea down and iterate a few options before taking a design onto the computer.

Reference: IDLE023
Title: Studio and Stationary
Date: 2021
Author: Jack Idle
Details: PIVOT Studio
Media: Photographs
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: I am so grateful to have a studio space which I love to spend time in, I make models, hand drawings and work on the computer in there.

Reference: IDLE030
Title: Autodesk Revit
Date: 2002
Author: Autodesk
Details: Autodesk Revit is a building information modelling software for architects, engineers, designers and contractors.
Media: Software
Credit: wikipedia.org/Autodesk_Revit

Description: Autodesk Revit is my main software we use for architecture design, it is ideal for BIM and collaborative working.

Reference: IDLE031
Title: Autodesk AutoCAD
Date: 1982
Author: Autodesk
Details: AutoCAD is a commercial computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application.
Media: Software
Credit: wikipedia.org/AutoCAD

Description: We use this for quick 2D tests and was our main software before training in Revit.

Curation Reference: IDLE032
Title: SketchUp
Date: 2000
Author: Brad Schell and Joe Esch
Details: SketchUp is a 3D modelling computer program for drawing applications such as architectural, interior design, landscape architecture, civil and mechanical engineering, film and video game design.
Media: Software
Credit: wikipedia.org/SketchUp

Description: SketchUp is fantastic for visualisations and quick tests, we use it to test materiality and create visualisations.

Curation Reference: IDLE033
Title: Adobe Creative Suite
Date: NA
Author: Adobe Systems
Details: Adobe Creative Suite (CS) is a software suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications developed by Adobe Systems. Each edition consisted of several Adobe applications, such as Photoshop, Acrobat, Premiere Pro or After Effects, InDesign, and Illustrator, which became industry standard applications for many graphic design positions.
Media: Software
Credit: wikipedia.org/Adobe_Creative_Suite

Description: Adobe Creative Suite is used for creating our portfolios, visualisations and diagrams.

Curation Reference: IDLE021
Title: Trig Pillar
Date: 2021
Author: Photograph by Michael Cresswell
Details: Hay Bluff Trig Pillar, Wales
Media: Photograph
Credit: trigbagging.co.uk

Description: Trig points are found across the UK as markers used to survey the land and sea level. Being from Sussex and spending quite a bit of time hiking across the downs, you often find a Trig point on a hilltop with the best views. They inspired the form and function of our Glowing Still project which was a proposal for a camera obscure built on a rooftop in Tottenham, which would offer a view across London and be a visual marker to orientate yourself too.

Curation Reference: IDLE017
Title: Sap Green Opera Rose
Date: 2020
Author: Callum Innes
Details: The interplay between the additive and subtractive process, making and unmaking, presence and absence, constitutes the essence of the oeuvre developed by Callum Innes.
Media: Painting
Credit: calluminnes.com

Description: His watercolour studies of edges and light are amazing, they have a sense of calm and intensity to them. A bit like a stock, with lots of complex vegetables being boiled down into a simple singular flavour. I play around with watercolours as a type of meditation when my work is getting a bit repetitive.

Curation Reference: IDLE019
Title: Polyvalent Studio
Date: NA
Author: Practice Architecture
Details: Designed and built by students at London Metropolitan School of Architecture the studio is made from a palette of cellulose based materials. The project was designed within the parameters of the caravan act and was constructed over a period of 12 days at Margent Farm. It was led by Paloma Gormley and David Grandorge with engineering consultancy from Structure Workshop.
Media: Structure
Credit: practicearchitecture.co.uk/project/cass-studio

Description: Practice Architecture is a very different practice to my other inspirations, they are deeply hands-on in how they deliver projects. Often using details and materials which can be easily constructed by hand, which could almost be categorised as lo-fi architecture, although I think their work is more romantic than that. You can see the way they have constructed a wall or a window, so the building is almost educating you as you walk around it, which is a world away from the factory-made parametric forms. To me, they are almost a contemporary to Walter Segal's work with self-build houses.