10 years on.

This September is a holds a special anniversary for me as, 10 years ago, I began my Professional Diploma at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales. For those who have never heard of the Centre (or CAT for short), it was founded in an abandoned slate quarry in the 1970s with the aim of championing sustainable technology and design. A pioneering charity and visitor centre in the subsequent decades, CAT started running sustainability courses from its award-winning W.I.S.E Building to educate aspiring architects and other professionals. My introduction to CAT was by chance as, on a family holiday to Wales the year before, my wife and I thought it sounded like a good place to take our young daughter. While in the gift shop, I noticed that the centre provided architectural training and I applied when I got home.

My decision to study at CAT was a mixture of naked opportunism and a determination to learn how to build better. The course structure allowed me to continue to work part-time and look after my young children. In a typical week I would work in practice three days and look after my children on another weekday. The remaining weekday, my evenings and weekends were almost solely dedicated to my university work. Needless to say, this did not leave an awful of time of anything else, but my wife and I developed a workable system. While not a full masters, the course allowed me to gain my Part II qualification in only 18 months. I had looked into part-time masters’ courses at local universities, but these would have taken four years to complete, and I doubted whether my sanity and attention-span could sustain me for that long – CAT seemed to offer an accelerated course whose intensity would keep me interested.

Beyond my mercenary reasons for studying at CAT, I wanted to go there because I felt it offered me the best opportunity to learn how to build in a better, more sustainable manner. My architectural education thus far, although better than many of my contemporaries, was still focussed on concrete and steel with little thought given to exploring how buildings could be built in a more environmentally conscious way. My work in practice did little to dissuade me that this was the prevailing industry view so I applied with a hope that I would meet and learn from others who had a similar mindset. 

The professional diploma course I enrolled on was 18 month’s long and covered the curriculum necessary to complete Part II of an Architect’s traditional training. Due to its remote location in the middle of Wales, the course revolved around monthly residential study weeks with the majority of a student’s time being spent developing their ideas at home. Weekly online tutorials with the course’s full-time tutor kept me on the right track while at home and informal study groups would periodically meet up based on geographical proximity. Each study week at CAT consisted of a month’s worth of studio crits, workshops and lectures condensed into five-and-a-half days which meant that the pace of learning was very intense and often we would have structured learning for 12 hours a day in addition to studio time. The major benefit of this was that for the week we were on site, there were very few distractions, and I certainly benefitted from being able to have in-depth conversations about design over multiple days.

The course projects at CAT were very varied although all of them had a sustainable slant and we were encouraged to think around the wider topics relating to the brief. We discussed the future of education while designing a new primary school for the nearby town of Machynlleth and looked at Welsh government planning policy when devising a scheme for a ‘One Planet Development’ house in Pembrokeshire. For our final-year Main Design Project (MDP) were given a fairly free reign to come up with our own projects and clients. I had become increasingly interested in the impact personal technology was having and decided to base my own project on designing a community-run workspace and business centre which also included a small medical facility for augmenting human bodies with technology. My ‘Cyborg Factory’ as it became known around the studio was a hugely fun and satisfying project to work on and it was really interesting to see how I could combine cutting edge technology with sustainable design solutions.

My major takeaway from my time at CAT was a reengagement with conceptual thought. When I joined in September 2016, I had been out of university for 5 years and had been working in practice for 3. My head was full of Building Regulations and RIBA Stages (my first pin-up was even done on drawing title sheets!) instead of pushing my ideas about the various possibilities each project brought. In many respects, I had to unlearn how to be an Architect in order to become a better designer. My eureka moment came during the primary school project where we asked to produce a series of conceptual images to capture the essence of our approach to the brief. After much grumbling about how pointless the exercise was, I struck upon the idea of using different balloons tied together with string to represent how the learning of each student was linked by their classroom environment. This process and the images I produced changed my perspective and from that point on I made sure to stop and think deeply about the work I was doing and push my own learning as far as possible. It is one of my greatest regrets that I did not go on and pursue the themes of my MDP at postgraduate level.

At the time of applying to CAT I was heavily involved with conservation architecture and was working with high-grade listed buildings. I knew that there was an element of sustainable building which dovetailed well with the heritage side of my work, but I knew there were other sub-fields such as Passivhaus design which I needed to learn more about. A selfish part of me saw that sustainable design was going to increase in importance and this course was a good way of future-proofing my career, but my time at CAT allowed me to see, probably for the first time, where I could begin to combine my skills of traditional building with modern design. 10 years later, the culmination of this has been my ability to found Open House Architecture and bring these skills directly to clients; it is not a small thing to say that CAT made OHA.

Completing my diploma was the most intense experience of my life. Working part-time, studying and looking after my children (my youngest was 6 months old when I started) was extremely difficult and many of our friends and family thought my wife and I were mad, but it proved to the springboard which helped to set my career on a better trajectory and, ultimately, lead to better life for my family. Despite its intensity I look back on my time at CAT with much fondness and am still in touch with my tutor and several of my course mates. To my great shame, I have only been back twice since leaving; I gave a lecture on Prehistoric Architecture a few years ago and was invited to sit in on some of the student crits. It felt very good to be able to give something back and I am long-overdue another visit. A decade on, what began as a chance decision to visit a local tourist attraction has become a central pillar of my career and for that, I am eternally grateful.