Why is colour in architecture so often an afterthought?

This article first appeared on bdonline on 5 January 2017Le Corbusier said colour was as powerful as the plan and section. So why is it so often an afterthought?I have a bee in my bonnet about colour in architecture. We don’t teach it properly and we don’t consider it until the rest of the design … Continued

Review of AA summer show

This review first appeared in the Architects’ Journal on 28 JULY, 2016Architect Joanna Day takes a look around the Architectural Association’s end-of-year showThe Architectural Association (AA)’s annual project review is usually a thrilling, if slightly exhausting, experience. A veritable treasure trove of architectural representation in the heart of Georgian London, you take a deep breath and enter … Continued

What does architecture mean in places like Syria and the Calais Jungle?

This review first appeared in bdonline on 24 June 2016.Joanna Day is impressed by the Architecture Foundation’s refugee festivalIt’s festival season. Festivals bring the opportunity to choose, within a compressed time-frame, from a range of acts or activities and to personally curate your own programme. It also exaggerates any “fear of missing out” tendencies – … Continued

urban Jigsaw
exhibition review

The following review first appeared in BDOnline on 13 June 2016:Joanna Day chews over some of the ideas for London’s mis-used spaces that surfaced through a Royal Academy competition Is the metaphor of a jigsaw apposite for the evolving project that is the city? In many ways not. There is no finished state, and no one … Continued

Be a Bold Mayor

BDOnline asked a selection of architects what they they thought should be on the new London Mayor’s agenda in their article ‘Be a Bold Mayor’ on 9 May 2016.  Joanna Day’s thoughts were quoted as follows:”As a female partner in an architectural practice I have been pleased to see Sadiq Khan highlighting gender inequality as a … Continued

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2016

Langstaff Day Architects are proud to have been selected to be part of this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. The model of the Dream Pavilion was designed and built in collaboration with Bartek Radecki and Unit 22.The Architecture Gallery was jointly curated by Academicians Ian Ritchie and Louisa Hutton, with the theme ‘Unbuilt’. The exhibition … Continued

The World of Charles and Ray Eames
Exhibition Review

The Barbican’s visually stimulating show is full of surprises, finds Joanna DayI have clear memories of being a child in a draughty school hall, grudgingly stacking plastic-and-metal chairs which had a particular smell. If you had told me then that 25 years later I would be found standing in a gallery mesmerised by a film … Continued

Contemplating the bother of Suburbia
Festival review

Generations of planners and architects have tried to ‘solve’ the suburbs. They’d have been better off enlisting the locals, the Architecture Foundation’s Doughnut festival heard:Boris Johnson knew to target it, and the Architecture Foundation thought it worth a day-long festival. The “Doughnut”, or London’s rapidly growing periphery, was the subject of a series of linked … Continued

Prize announcement:
Treehouse competition winner

To mark LANDSCAPE 2015’s partnership with the London Design Festival, this Summer the Landscape Show ran a treehouse design competition.The brief was to create a space that would work without a tree. The footprint could be no more than 9 square metres and achievable within a £20,000 budget. Otherwise designers were free to run wild … Continued