softroom London: Oliver Salway, Chris Bagot & Daniel Evans

softroom’s virtual work for commercial clients has opened up a new realm of fictionalised, fantasy environments, and show a way forward for conceptual architecture. A practice committed to built projects, public and private, they have never tried to differentiate virtual and built domains, but explore the scope of each. This approach has brought work from advertising, tv, pop video production, publishing, retail and multi-media clients, and made their practice a highly viable one at a time when traditional sources of commissions were running scarce.

East London: Mark Brearley and Julian Lewis

East is an urban design, landscape and architecture practice working in the public realm on projects which promote a better quality relationship between the social and environmental aspects of urban change and renewal. Their patient and provocative studies of the needs of entire areas in London produce useful signposts to the wide range of parties involved in urban change. Specific building projects evolve plans for linking infrastructure, and the imaginative use of land, often to connect spaces which have become isolated and make ‘places’ out of them again.

Urban Salon London: Diana Cochrane and Alex Mowat

Urban Salon has an equal interest in the impact of large scale urban projects and planning, and in expressive small-scale interiors. They have been involved with many projects of a temporary and portable nature, for instance, short-scale buildings, exhibitions, events and provisional structures, drawing on the inspiration of alternative building techniques such as those used by the entertainment industry.

FAT London: Sean Griffiths, Sam Jacob and Charles Holland

FAT’s identity as an architectural design and art practice had led them to research how architecture can be cross-fertilized with other visual disciplines. One major focus of their recent work explores the representational power of architecture and architectural interiors, through the models and miniatures; highlighting what things are made of rather than the more common abstractions found in architecture. FAT’s play with scale not only changes perceptions of context and language, but it makes architectural space more immediate and enjoyable.

muf art/architecture London: Liza Fior, Juliet Bidgood, Katherine Clarke, Ashley McCormick,Caterina Almada and Rosamund Calthrop

muf is a collaborative practice of architects and artists in London who radically redefine traditional and formal notions of architectural practice. Working in close collaboration with local communities, frequently on projects funded by public bodies, they start by researching social conditions through direct consultation with the public, and then through various means including visualisation, building and art projects use the responses to help generate projects. What is revealed through their varied work in the public realm are otherwise hidden priorities.

de Rijke Marsh Morgan (drmm) London: Alex de Rijke, Philip Marsh and Sadie Morgan

de Rijke Marsh Morgan have always worked resourcefully with means and materials which are found, creating architecture which, although practical, is frequently more surreal than modernist. In making projects, they draw on their international library of catalogue products, appropriating their mass produced qualities in a way to create ‘non-standard’ architecture. Described as ‘magical technicians’, transparency in function and form is highly important to drmm and they apply both a playfulness and an invention to make both private living spaces as well as hard working public buildings.

Adjaye Associates London: David Adjaye

Adjaye is an architect who delights in his disciplined approach to space, highlighting the versatility of materials. Whether aluminium honeycomb, simple Eternit panels or limestone, their juxtaposition embraces the sensuous and the austere, and allows them to transcend in their impact any limitations in budget. Adjaye works to commissions in both the public and private sector and his architecture demonstrates how fertile this overlap can be.

Block London: Zoe Smith and Graham Williamson

Block’s interest in re-working conventional experiences, spatial norms and materials uses the city as a reference in the development of a distinctive design language. This introduces an element of surprise, by taking elements out of their everyday context. Their approach is architectural without being stylised, like film-makers, they observe and reuse processes and spaces that make up the generic, utilitarian city, and explore ways of reusing residual environments they come across.