Register - Architecture & Landscape

In this episode Ellis Woodman interviews Timothy Smith and Jonathan Taylor of Smith Taylor Architects. Ellis is director of the architecture foundation, and a valued thinker and writer about architecture. Jonathan and Timothy established their practice in 2010. In their practice and their teaching they investigate classicism, and its potential as a living language of architecture. They engage with this way of thinking, not through nostalgia or sentimentality, but with criticality. This is unusual among contemporary classicists, many of whom seek to make perfected classical fragments, solely by engagement with the classical treatises, and an elitist approach to brief and budget. This hermeticism misses the point that architecture gains its value by abrasion against the forces which bring it into being and shape it, be they technical, economic, legislative etc. It is in this friction between idealised and realisable that a conversation emerges that allows architecture to act as a carrier of cultural k