This British Architecture Collective Is Always "Off-Task." Why Does Its Work Draw So Much Attention?

They helped lead a British version of the "housing for all" movement

Assemble, a British architecture collective founded in 2010, looks perpetually "off-task." It rarely takes commercial work. What it does best is turn abandoned or idle space into somewhere people want to go: gas stations, the leftover ground beneath flyovers, the half-demolished shells of buildings nobody ever finished.

What brought Assemble into public view was the renewal project it joined in the Granby neighborhood of Liverpool, where ten Victorian buildings that had sat derelict for more than a decade were repaired and handed back to the community.

The project won them the 2015 Turner Prize — the first time the award often called the "Oscars of the art world" had gone to a group that appeared to have nothing to do with art. People started asking questions. How can urban renewal count as art? Will it invite opportunistic artists flying the flag of "social concern"? And what will they do to cities?

"When we were told we'd been shortlisted, we were confused ourselves," says James Binning, one of Assemble's founders, who spoke with QDaily in an exclusive interview at the MINDPARK creative conference in Shenzhen this April. After the noise around the Turner Prize died down, nothing much changed for Assemble. The renewal of Granby simply carried on.

"We're certainly not the art world — we may not even count as an architecture practice," James says. He also teaches at the Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. Assemble has stayed at about 15 people for years and sticks to small projects.

Their first project was the conversion of a disused gas station in London. James, freshly graduated at the time, and his collaborators used recycled materials to make seating and a curtain 3 kilometers long; when the curtain came down, the open forecourt turned into a self-contained indoor cinema. James says they wanted to suggest what might be done with the more than 4,000 gas stations across Britain that have been "retired."

"Hand-sewn." "Local materials." As design, none of it sounds technically demanding. But Assemble keeps finding room for design where there appears to be none.

In Stratford, in east London, they put a studio on an empty lot. Handmade concrete tiles in macaron colors form a facade of overlapping scales, out of materials that can be taken down easily and rebuilt somewhere else. That macaron-colored wall became a favorite Instagram backdrop; James says the point was to get the people who came for a photograph to linger in the square outside it.

Another Assemble-made "photo spot" is also in east London: an art space under a flyover, a pitched-roof "house" poking its head into the gap between two motorways. James and his collaborators invented a backstory for it — a stubborn landlord refused to give up his land for the elevated road, so the construction crew built the road hard up against his house.

"Who's in the right here? Do this 'house' and the flyover leave each other in peace, or is there a taut string ready to snap?" This may be their most "artistic" project. James hoped the strange, cramped space, with traffic roaring past overhead, would make people think. In the nine weeks after it opened, more than 40,000 visitors came for performances and workshops.

After these small conversions, Assemble was invited into larger neighborhood-renewal schemes. But when they carried their earlier romantic ideas into the communities, local people were hard to interest. The first setback came in New Addington, a new town in south London.

The land New Addington sits on was farmland. In the 1930s, to relieve housing pressure and urban problems in central London, it was designated a new town and filled with housing estates — without matching jobs or places to spend free time. Racial tension deepened the decline, and a riot broke out there in 2011.

By the time Assemble arrived, they faced rows of emptied houses, dim streetlights, and unfinished buildings whose floor slabs were mostly wrecked. After the riot the government paid less and less attention to this zone marked off by an "invisible red line"; public spending kept shrinking and most city services broke down — it even showed in how often the rubbish was collected.

"You can see the government's logic in the way public bodies describe these areas. The filth and the decay are treated as simply the way things are, but nobody mentions the policies that produced them. People seem to be waiting for this new town to die on its own."

People told Assemble they weren't the first to turn up promising change; one wave of urban-renewal plans after another had already brought in batches of artists, officials and architects. "Everyone before us failed, so we'd be no different. Claims? Claims are only claims," James says. People here, he adds, had long been suffering from "fatigue of promises."

"I don't know how it is in China, but in a lot of Western press coverage the designer gets cast as a figure who can do anything. When we actually get to the site, all that creativity and agency you thought you had looks very doubtful."

James and five collaborators moved into the neighborhood, and more joined later. Over more than six months in residence, they changed things bit by bit.

The first change was to how people walked. The square was hard to reach, barely used, and had been given over to parking. Assemble replanned the footpaths so people could walk into the square straight from the housing and the shops. They planted a row of trees along one side to separate the square from the parking next to it and keep it safe. They also added a skating track and drew up a timetable of activities for it.

"This is not the 'design' architects are used to," James says. Traditional designers are used to designing a shop, an office building, a mall. "But none of that is what New Addington needs. The square, the shopping street — they're already here. What we had to do wasn't addition. Nobody needed new buildings."

"A lot of designers are used to handing out questionnaires or collecting opinions, taking them back to the office to sort through, producing a whole book of plans, then coming back to the community with documents, renderings or a model: 'Look, this is our idea.' But from a resident's point of view, facing a room full of people like that, the tension may be exactly where the distrust comes from."

Unlike most architecture practices, Assemble is willing to spend a long time talking, and it can do so because of the unusual clients it works for: community land trusts (CLTs).

A CLT is a nonprofit that local residents join voluntarily, set up to produce "housing we can afford." It applies to public bodies to acquire land ownership cheaply; the homes it builds or renovates can be sold or rented to local CLT members at prices and rents set according to residents' incomes, and no individual may resell or sublet on their own. Whatever the trust earns goes back into building the community.

At first CLTs could get hold of little land. The East London Community Land Trust put its first project in St Clement's, on the site of a psychiatric hospital that had been closed for more than a decade; in 2016 it built 23 low-rent apartments there.

The Bristol Community Land Trust began by paying £1 to take a derelict school off the local council, and turned it into 12 homes. Residents joined the work on the old school themselves, earning their own "sweat equity" with their labor.

CLTs, which began appearing in Britain around 2000, have grown in recent years into a "housing for all" movement, giving local communities homes they can afford and making sure residents are not pushed out. As of 2017 Britain had 225 CLTs, which had provided 700 affordable homes between them; by 2020 they expect to supply 3,000 housing units.

The Granby renewal in Liverpool that won Assemble the Turner Prize was in fact commissioned by the Granby CLT.

Deindustrialization from the 1960s on left Liverpool, Sheffield and other industrial cities in decline. Granby was one of the main places where immigrants coming to Britain first settled, and it became the most racially mixed neighborhood in central Liverpool.

As the economy worsened and unemployment kept climbing, and with racial tension on top of that, a large riot broke out in Granby in 1981 and lasted nine days; more than 70 houses burned down. Afterwards the Liverpool government began pushing a demolish-and-rebuild plan meant to replace the area with lower-density housing, which the local community opposed.

"In Britain people have learned from years of experience to be skeptical. Nobody believes that once you move out you get to come back to the community. It becomes 'prettier,' but that has nothing to do with you. Under the usual kind of planning, moving out means exile — like the gentrification people have been arguing about for so many years."

In 2010, to save money, the Conservative government stopped urban-renewal plans in many places, and the demolition of Granby was shelved along with them. A policy that simply petered out left the neighborhood worse off. Some residents started their own gardening groups and street markets, using plants and painted murals to cover the stalled construction as best they could.

"We didn't create anything that wasn't already there. There was a community here already; after every kind of bad development, people were still getting on with tidying up their daily lives. 'Sense of community' is a hypocritical phrase — to keep gentrification from wiping the community out, people end up insincerely manufacturing an 'atmosphere' that merely looks like one."

At the end of 2014, the Granby CLT finally raised enough money for the Ten House Project, and began repairing ten Victorian houses in the neighborhood that had stood empty for years. They recruited young people from the local community onto the building crew. After the work, five houses would be sold at prices set by local incomes, and five rented to CLT members.

Assemble also helped run a workshop in Granby that drew residents in to make tableware, door handles, candlesticks and other small goods by hand; the proceeds go to the Granby CLT as well.

The success of the Ten House Project, and Assemble's Turner Prize, brought more money in. The Granby CLT won the backing of the Liverpool government and was able to start a new Four Corners Project. They took over vacant, formerly publicly owned shops on the street corners; having supplied low-cost apartments, they will next supply low-cost premises to local traders.

CLTs are racing against land development that never stops. The Guardian has reported on the tense standoff in Camden, where, faced with new development plans, a CLT formed by residents and local businesses together demanded that the homes and the workplaces of the original residents and businesses be kept.

But they still have to convince the government of what there is to gain.

About the MINDPARK creative conference: it was held in Shenzhen from April 20 to 23, 2018, under the theme "Future City." Through idea forums, urban practice projects and other formats, it brought creatives, designers and managers from around the world together to think about the patterns and trends running from the individual to the environment, growth to consumption, and brand to industry, in order to build working models for the future city and look for the key to constructing future cities in China and around the world.

(All images in this article come from Assemble's official website.)