Isabel Allen

London, Somerset

Editor of Architecture Today. Editorial Director of BEAM. Former Editor of Citizen and The Architect's Journal. Plus a decade building (mostly) social housing.

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Articles

Principles for Responsible Timber Construction – and a call for entries for Built by Nature’s 2025 Prize - Architecture Today

1 week ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

Timber is an increasingly important construction material. The business-as-usual global demand for timber is set to increase 37% by 2050; in a scenario where mass timber and manmade cellulose fibre use increases, that figure could reach 60%. Unregulated expansion of timber demand poses some risks, such as biodiversity loss from unsustainable sourcing, as well as carbon leakage due to inefficient material use. The sector needs more examples of what good practice looks like to facilitate expansion.
National Gallery Sainsbury Wing

2 weeks ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

It was never going to be straightforward. The extension to London’s National Gallery has been a divisive subject in the architectural world for decades. Since 1981, to be precise, when the Secretary of State, Michael Heseltine, launched a competition to give the Gallery a new wing at the north west corner of Trafalgar Square. The site’s former occupant, Hampton’s Furniture Store, had been bombed during the Blitz, and the site had never quite regained its sense of purpose.
Architecture Today

3 weeks ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

Roger Madelin is in an ebullient mood. It’s five years since British Land obtained planning consent for an Allies and Morrison-designed masterplan to transform Canada Water in south-east London into the capital’s buzziest neighbourhood.
Marks Barfield Architects on Being a Good Ancestor

1 month ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

Marks Barfield Architects was one of the front-runners in the Being a Good Ancestor section of the 2024 Regenerative Architecture Index. In this video Julia Barfield and Darcy Arnold-Jones share their experiences of developing – and delivering on – a strategy for change. Julia Barfield is a founding director of Marks Barfield Architects. Darcy Arnold-Jones is an architect at Marks Barfield Architects and the practice’s Circular Economy Lead.
De Valera Library and Súil Gallery

1 month ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

De Valera Library and Súil Gallery, a new county library and municipal art gallery, was completed in 2024 and is the latest in a sequence of contemporary multi-functional libraries built in Ireland over the last decade. Despite the slow drip-feed of funding for this building type, local authorities, such as Clare County Council, have championed the library as a critical building block in a town’s social infrastructure and a catalyst for urban renewal and placemaking.
One month to go until FOOTPRINT+ 2025

1 month ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

Now in its fourth year, FOOTPRINT+ 2025 takes place on 14-15 May at Old Billingsgate in the heart of London. The UK’s leading conference for decarbonising the built environment will bring 260 expert speakers, 50 forward-thinking exhibitors, and more than 2,000 delegates from the worlds of property, construction, sustainability and design.
Architecture Today

1 month ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

Project Orange founders Christopher Ash and James Soane photographed at their new studio in Lavenham, Suffolk. “It’s the ideal place to work from as it has a garden and a view of Tudor roof tops. It was originally an artist’s studio which was retained and added to. The interior is clad in old pine planks which lends a mellow ambience.”The climate emergency is code red. Architecture is part of a system that is destroying our planet.
Reinventing practice: Rachel Hoolahan

2 months ago | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

Rachel Hoolahan (left) with colleagues Sacha Clark, Rufus Burridge and Simon Whittaker at 1 Hanover Street in Mayfair, London, a Grade II-listed office building which Orms is refurbishing and extending for The Crown Estate. Orms is returning the original ceiling tiles back to SAS, who will refurbish and resell them through a programme it has developed with Orms’ support. What’s the first step towards adopting regenerative design in practice? Do one thing differently.
Exposure to autoimmune disorders is associated with increased Alzheimer’s disease risk in a multi-site electronic health record analysis

2 months ago | cell.com | Grace Ramey |Alice S. Tang |Thanaphong Phongpreecha |Monica Yang |Sarah R. Woldemariam |Tomiko Oskotsky | +6 more

Keywords autoimmunity Alzheimer’s bioinformatics case-control cohort electronic health records risk analysis sex differences statistical epidemiology Introduction Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease that is accompanied by enormous social and economic burdens, and its prevalence is increasing due to the growing aging population worldwide.1,2 AD is characterized biologically by amyloid plaques and tau deposition in the brain, while clinical syndromic diagnoses,...
Reinventing practice: Jerry Tate

Feb 18, 2025 | architecturetoday.co.uk | Isabel Allen

Jerry Tate at Tate + Co’s studio at Stamford Works, a former printworks in Dalston, East London that has been converted into mixed use space including flexible workspace for the creative industries. It’s been said you can’t make everyone do the right thing, but you can show them what it could be. That’s true to an extent. Unless you’re working for a super-rich client with impeccable intentions, you’ll always be compromised. So what the hell is regenerative design?