Claire Pollock Awarded RIBA Honorary Fellowship

AHMM's Partnerships Lead, Claire Pollock, has been made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. RIBA Honorary Fellowships are awarded every year to people who have made a significant  contribution to architecture but are not architects. 

Claire is a cultural producer with three decades of experience specialising in innovative collaboration and participation within architecture. In her role as Partnerships Lead at AHMM, Claire has transferred knowledge and experience from her work in national cultural organisations to deliver a high impact programme to a diverse range of communities. 

She co-chairs the practice's  Partnerships Group, which she set up in 2018 to bring together people from across the practice to direct resources, skills, fundraising and volunteering, and leads the development and delivery of AHMM's partnerships work with charities, cultural organisations and community initiatives. 

Collaborations she has developed and led include architectural workshops with Accumulate - The Art School for the Homeless; an exploration of RIBA HQ with young people from inclusive theatre Chickenshed; Migrateful Kitchen, a pro bono project for a charity delivering cookery classes led by refugees; and an annual Summer School for young people. 

Claire also leads on social value, and AHMM's work on Tower Hamlets Town Hall was recently awarded a Thornton Education Trust Inspiring Future Generations Award for Social Value.

LFA Studio Late

In June AHMM opened our Morelands office doors to the public as part of the London Festival of Architecture, with two separate sessions on the same day. 

In the afternoon young people aged 15-19 years old interested in finding out more about becoming an architect were invited to join our annual Open Studio for activities including virtual reality exploration; talks about architecture, AHMM and sustainability; drawing with our Sketch Club; and a modelshop demonstration. 

The evening session was part of the Festival's Clerkenwell and Shoreditch Studio Lates and was an opportunity for the public to meet some of our Partnerships collaborators including mentoring sessions led by Narrative Practice, which advocates for young architecture and built environment professionals from underrepresented backgrounds. 

There was also a performance by young people from Ministry of Stories, our Charity of the Year, from their 'London Landmarks' project. The evening included contributions from Shade the UK and Found Futures as well as sketching on our office rooftop and guided tours around our office and modelshop. 

'Architecture in Time', a series of images by photographer Tim Soar telling the stories of how people and communities have changed and reimagined places and spaces AHMM has designed, was also exhibited in our Project Room space for everyone to explore, with a digital component that could be scanned to take visitors to more information about the projects displayed. 

Refugee Week

In June AHMM took part in Refugee Week, the world's largest arts and culture festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. 

A group of artists from New Art Studio visited AHMM's White Collar Factory for a tour of the building including seeing inside AKT II workspace. They then went on to our Morelands office for a tour of the modelshop followed by lunch, provided by The Syrian Sunflower, with sketching and painting on the rooftop. 

The New Art Studio is a unique therapeutic art studio for asylum seekers and refugees based at the Islington Arts Factory. It is a place where individuals can escape from the stress and difficulties of what they are going through and immerse themselves into their artwork, which are not just beautiful pieces to look at, but are statements impassioned by a collective hardship shared by trauma they have experienced. 

AHMM's Partnerships group has supported the studio for more than seven years through workshops, knowledge sharing and donations. 

St Luke's Community Centre Women's Multicultural Group Visits White Collar Factory

In June members of the St Luke's Community Centre Women's Multicultural Group visited AHMM's White Collar Factory with Associate Tom Wells for a tour of the building. 

The group also had the chance to see inside the office of AKT II, the structural engineers who worked on the project, who are based within the building. 

The Women's Multicultural club is a friendly group within St Luke's that welcomes women of all ages and backgrounds to come together to de-stress and connect with like-minded women from the area. 

AHMM's Partnership group has been a corporate supporter of St Luke's for more than nine years providing financial support as well as workshops, food bank donations and supporting their Job Club programme, providing one-to-one support to people in the local community who are searching for work. 

Victor Kite Prize

This year the Victor Kite Award for Design Technology was awarded to Isabelle Borrow and William Li. The award for students at The Bartlett School of Architecture recognises the best work in Design Technology (year 2) and is awarded at the school's annual summer show opening ceremony. 

The award was established in 2013 by former AHMM staff member and Bartlett tutor, Scott Batty, in memory of architect Victor Kite. Victor was a mentor to Simon, Jonathan, Paul and Peter as Part III students, and later to many others at AHMM, playing a significant role in the practice and its work. 

The Summer Show is the Bartlett's flagship exhibition, and one of the largest student architecture shows in the world. This years exciting show celebrates dynamic, radical and innovative design 

AHMM Summer School

In August AHMM held its annual summer school across our London and Bristol offices. 

Aimed at young people aged 16-18 years old, the Summer School is an important part of our Partnerships work to support the future architecture profession and help ensure it is diverse. 

The topic of this year's Summer School was 'Children's Right to he City', with students exploring the role of children and young people in city-making and considering how young communities can reclaim space to play, learn and grow in the city. 

Over the week 18 young people in London and six in Bristol participated in workshops introducing them to new ways to observe and explore the space surrounding them, including architectural drawing, understanding CDM, modelmaking, routes into architecture, site visits, sustainability. collaborative creativity, and daily mentoring. 

To support the development of their work and ideas, the young people also engaged with charities and oraganisations who promote equality and support socially excluded young people, provide awareness and knowledge of city making to your people, and who enhance young people's and children's access to the built environment. This included members from Narrative Practice, The Royal College of Art MA Interior Design programme, and participants from Chickenshed. 

Climate Change, All Change Exhibition

In Partnership with Arup, AHMM completed a six-week programme with 120 Year 5 students at Ashton Gate Primary School in Bristol, as part of Climate Change All Change, a national initiative that partners top designers from diverse fields with school children to co-create innovative solutions to the climate crisis. 

The focus for this particular programme was flooding and how Bristol may look in 100 years' time. Arup and AHMM created a series of workshops, covering site visits, impacts of climate change and flooding, modelling, drawing and design evolution. 

The students presented their completed designs to an expert panel from Arup, AHMM and Climate Change All Change. A CGI vision for Bristol 2120 was then created by the teams' in-house visualisers from the students' designs and unveiled at a celebration at the school. The visual was then put on display at the Tobacco Factory. 

Shape My City

The Bristol office ran a Shape My City workshop with Hayhurst & Co. as part of our ongoing Partnerships work with the charity Design West. 

Shape My City is an award-winning talent accelerator programme for 15-18 year olds that seeks to change the future workforce across the built environment. The programme is a year-long, free-to-access course, which gives talents young people opportunities they might not otherwise have, made possible by the support of built environment partners. 

As the first session of the year, students were tasked with designing a community space which answered the question; what key ingredients create successful spaces for a community to come together? 

The students used a series of paper nets to create forms on a given 'site', collaging onto these to create their chosen building for the community. Their proposals where then tessellated into a small city of buildings, including community centres, gyms, schools, bus stations, cafes, shopping centres and libraries. The collected proposals showed good consideration for user experience, accessibility, materiality and sustainability. 

photography by Paul Blakemore

Time2Sketch

Partnered with the Architects Benevolent Society, a charity that offers confidential advice, support and financial assistance to the architectural community and their families in a time of need, AHMM helped bring to life the Time2Sketch 2024 Colouring Book. This is the third time AHMM has shared our graphic design skills to develop the charity colouring book as part of our ongoing support of the Architects Benevolent Society. 

Celebrating the stunning sketches from this year's national competition, themed 'Looking Outside', this colouring book dives into architectural inspiration and mindfulness with each page reflecting the imaginative entries of one of the 25 selected participants, offering a perfect creative escape. 

Each purchase supports the Architects Benevolent Society in providing critical assistance to the architectural community. 

Young City Makers Award

Bonner Primary School, Bethnal Green, working with AHMM won the Materials category at the Young City Makers Awards. 

For this year's Young City Makers, the AHMM team collaborated with sixty Year 5 students at Bonner Primary School, asking them to undertake a 'live' task on one of our projects at the same time as our architect team. 

The school is very close to The London Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green, a project with Latimer by Clarion Housing Group transforming a disused site into a community of 274 new homes and reinstating the historic grounds, opening them up to the public for the first time in nearly a decade. The site includes an ancient mulberry tree, reputed to be the oldest tree in East London. We tasked the Y5 students with the same task we are undertaking of designing to not only protect but also celebrate the tree and secure its future. 

AHMM provided a potted herb to represent the mulberry tree set within an A3 foamboard structure for each group of six students to explore their ideas for a context of the mulberry tree. Drawing on their knowledge of the project built from a site visit and information shared by the architects and sustainability expert, as well as their own lived experience, the students created their own neighbourhoods and community.