Chris Foges

London

Contributing Editor at The RIBA Journal

Freelance Writer and Editor at Freelance

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Articles

Artefact: practice widens its scope after impressing with home extensions

2 weeks ago | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

Since setting up almost impulsively during the pandemic, Artefact's founders Daniel Marmot and Benedetta Rogers have purposefully focused on the craft of constructionArtefact was born on a beach, and in a hurry. Founders Daniel Marmot and Benedetta Rogers were working at the same London practice, and taking on small side projects, when the opportunity arose to do a new build house together. With some family and friends in tow, they took a trip to Southend to consider their options.
New College Oxford: university campus rethinks the quadrangle

1 month ago | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

Quadrangles at Oxford University have one thing in common: they are, as the name suggests, at least roughly rectilinear. Or at least they have been until now, with the arrival of curved quads at the Gradel Quadrangles designed by David Kohn Architects for New College. Bends and bulges abound in every detail of an ensemble comprising 94 student bedrooms and ancillary facilities, offices, a concert hall, and a classroom wing for a prep school attached to the college.
St Pancras Campus, London, by Caruso St John

1 month ago | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

Architect Peter St John does not mince words about the standard of commercial development in London: ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘depressing’ are among the printable judgements. Offices tend either to glassy banality or gauche attention-seeking, and have a deadening effect on public space. ‘There aren’t many commercial buildings one can really admire,’ he says.
An Exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum Examines the Neoclassical Architect’s Role as Modernist Forebear

2 months ago | architecturalrecord.com | Chris Foges

Visitors to John Soane’s extraordinary house-museum in London can have no doubt that he was steeped in history. Its sepulchral basement is filled to bursting with a collection of antiquities befitting a Neoclassical architect whose education culminated in the 18th-century Grand Tour. Plaster friezes and Greco-Roman busts on fluted columns cluster around a 3,000-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus. But was Soane also a kind of proto-Modernist, a century or more ahead of his time?
RIBA Royal Gold Medallist 2025: SANAA

2 months ago | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

The award of the 2025 Royal Gold Medal to SANAA partners Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa honours an extraordinary body of work. Their buildings are diverse but with common qualities: boldly innovative, refined – sometimes to the point of near-immateriality – and both planned and realised with diagrammatic clarity, suggesting rare confidence and determination. And yet talking to the pair – via video call from their Tokyo studio – they are strikingly self-effacing.
MacEwen Award 2025 special mention: Halifax Bus Station

2 months ago | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

Halifax’s new bus station, by Stephen George & Partners, is an unusually ambitious piece of civic infrastructureFollow a natural desire line through the old wool markets of Halifax and you are delivered precisely to an entrance of the Yorkshire town’s new bus station, in one of three historic stone buildings integrated into the complex. Approach along busy Market Street, and the process of arrival is equally intuitive and welcoming.
Review: Midland Metropolitan University Hospital by Cagni Williams, HKS and Sonnemann Toon

Nov 3, 2024 | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

Big hospitals might be the most difficult buildings to design. Circulation is a real head-scratcher, needing discrete routes for staff, visitors, ‘blue-light’ arrivals and bed-bound patients in constant motion between wards and clinical areas. Added to that are countless conduits for fluids, gasses and data to rival those of any science lab. There’s a panoply of spaces with unique and onerous requirements, from adjacency to infection control.
A Finely Tuned Revamp of London’s Warburg Institute Broadens its Public Reach

Oct 13, 2024 | architecturalrecord.com | Chris Foges

“The Warburg Institute was founded to study the Renaissance,” says its director Bill Sherman, “and ended up changing the way we see the world.” That’s a bold claim but justified. As part of the University of London since 1944, this unique academic center has pioneered the study of culture and society through images, guided by the somewhat eccentric preoccupations of its founder, Aby Warburg.
Profile: Allies and Morrison managing partner Joanna Bacon

Sep 24, 2024 | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

Large-scale projects and the design of a practice have provided equally enjoyable challenges to Allies and Morrison’s managing partner Joanna BaconWhat does a typical day look like for the managing partner of Allies and Morrison? ‘My diary always looks like a toast rack,’ says Joanna Bacon as we settle down in a meeting room at the 300-strong firm’s London studio. ‘Chock-a-block with meetings, but they are very varied.’ Today she’s already been to the gym.
RUSS's self-build scheme breaks march of lookalike London housing blocks

Jul 8, 2024 | ribaj.com | Chris Foges

Travelling by train through the London Borough of Lewisham gives a snapshot of recent housing development. Dozens of new buildings flash by, mostly beige brick slabs with grids of punched windows. Their similarity reflects the generic product on offer. But at Ladywell something unexpected appears. A pair of conjoined four-storey blocks with crinkly tin facades and splashes of colour around the windows, nestled among trees, is more Amsterdam or Berlin than New London Vernacular.