— Approach
As architects, we are not only shaping spaces — we are shaping futures.
Three principles shape Jack’s approach: a belief that buildings should outlast their original purpose; a practice that uses hands and eyes alongside screens; and a working knowledge of how buildings actually get built.
Permanence over disposability
Contemporary construction is shaped by a culture of planned obsolescence. Buildings are designed for short lifecycles, with material reuse and recycling held up as the answer to embedded carbon. Jack’s work — most clearly in the MArch thesis on architectural longevity — questions that premise. A building that endures, physically and socially, is doing more sustainability work than a building designed to be carefully demolished after thirty years.
This shapes decisions early: large-span, adaptable interiors over tightly fitted plans; tectonic systems that can be repaired; materials that age well rather than ones designed to be sealed inside a wall and never seen again. The aim is buildings that can be re-inhabited, subdivided, repurposed long after their first occupants leave. Permanence as the most generous form of sustainability.
Drawing and making as thinking
Hand drawing, charcoal studies and physical model-making sit alongside digital practice in Jack’s working methods — equally weighted, not as nostalgic counterpoints to the screen but as different ways of thinking through a project. A charcoal study reveals proportion and tone in ways a CAD elevation can’t. A card model exposes problems with circulation that a plan view politely hides. The two modes correct each other.
A dedicated Drawings page on this site catalogues the working drawings that sit behind every finished project — perspective studies, hand-drawn plans, model-making process and detail sketches. The tactile thinking comes first; the digital follows.
Knowing how things get built
Alongside studio work, Jack has spent time on construction sites — shadowing electricians and bricklayers, working on a 1:1 live build at Kingston School of Art, and learning joinery and cabinet-making outside the studio. The result is a working understanding of how design intent translates into built reality: how a contractor reads a drawing, how a junction comes together, how materials behave on a site rather than in a render.
This grounds the architecture. Details are drawn with construction in mind from the earliest stages, not solved at technical-design stage. Buildability becomes part of the design language rather than a constraint on it.
Across these three principles runs a single thread: the conviction that architecture is a slow, considered practice — one that should leave the world a little better made than it found it.
— Jack Chapman