Hiring.

Wadhal is looking for a talented Architectural Assistant to join the studio.

Wadhal is an architecture studio based in London, creating narrative-led spaces that reconsider design, tradition and culture.

We are seeking an Architectural Assistant to join the practice on a full or part-time basis, contributing to a diverse range of projects. This is a unique opportunity for a passionate and motivated individual to become a core member of our small team.

Responsibilities

-Assisting Project Architect with client meetings, taking minutes and keeping records
-Arranging quotes from consultants and issuing briefing documents
-Collating visual references and preparing hand sketches
-Preparing architectural drawings, digital models and visualisations
-Creating physical models to test design ideas and suit project requirements
-Formatting client presentations and submitting relevant statutory applications
-Preparing technical design drawings, specifications and schedules
-Liaising with clients and consultants
-Attending construction site visits
-General administrative support

Requirements

-A genuine interest in design and a willingness to learn
-Undergraduate qualification or above in Architecture
-Hard-working and highly organised
-Confident verbal, written & visual communicator
-Self-motivated; able to work autonomously within a small team
-Excellent technical drawing and construction detailing skills
-Highly skilled in AutoCAD, Rhino/ SketchUp and V-Ray
-Experience with Grasshopper would be an advantage 
-Proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign

Offer

-Opportunity to work from concept to completion on design-led projects
-Competitive salary and hybrid working
-Access to co-working spaces
-28 days annual leave
-RIBA Pension scheme
-Monthly CPD

To apply

Please email your application to the Studio Manager at karen@wadhal.co.uk by midnight on 25th February, including your Cover Letter, CV & Portfolio. Please send these via a WeTransfer link and do not attach large files to your email.

Candidates must be eligible to work in the UK with a recognised Part 1/ Part 2 qualification. Wadhal is an equal opportunities employer. We strongly encourage applications from candidates who are under-represented within the architecture industry.

The Charpai.

Charpais are commonly found across rural communities in South-Asia, made from four rounded timber legs and posts to form size of a single bed. As they were traditionally fabricated prior to mechanical fixings being readily available, all the joints are solid mortise and tenon without the need for nails or screws. These joints are highlighted beautifully at each corner to express how the posts connect to the feet. The timber frame is typically finished with cane weaving as a readily available by-product of agriculture forming a comfortable base. The charpai is specifically interesting to explore as it performs the functions required from all furniture in a typical home with a single unifying design.

Most commonly, charpais are used as a bed, for sitting, socialising and eating meals indoors or outdoors. They are a bed, a dining table, a sofa and garden furniture. Often many charpais are arranged in a U-shape for communal meeting so they become a mini auditorium. Historically, before people had bathrooms, four charpais would be tilted vertically for washing to form a shower enclosure, so they become sanitaryware. During events, charpais are used to store food and make Halwa (a desert) so they also become a kitchen.

Two charpais can be stacked to form bunk beds to become a space saving device. During warmer months charpais are used to keep quilts to become storage and the furniture of different seasons. Dogs are often tied to the posts of a charpai and shelter underneath from the sun to become furniture for your pets. Multiple charpais can be arranged vertically to form a screening wall where furniture becomes architecture.

A cloth can be tied to two posts on a charpai to form a baby's cradle. During a funeral, charpais are used as an open coffin. In this respect, the charpai is the furniture of life and death. If someone is mourning, charpais are turned upside down as an expression of grief to become the furniture of symbolism, transcending pure function.

Charpais in Veranda.

The Seven Wonders.

The Off Grid Jewel.

The climate crisis, pandemic and rapid changes in technology have changed the way we live forever. The typical family home with a living room orientated around a television, with bedrooms above is no longer relevant to the way we live, work, and relax. The Off Grid Jewel rethinks the home with changing lifestyles over the next decade in mind. While the design is organised as a four-bedroom house, it creates six different opportunities for home working. This includes dedicated spaces in each bedroom, a separate home office and an integrated workspace in the living room.

The proposal takes a fabric first approach via significant insulation throughout the envelope. The entire building is clad in an integrated solar panel rainscreen and utilises an Air Source Heat Pump with underfloor heating. In the summer months, overhangs to the ground floor terraces protect from overheating. Opening windows across each elevation create ample opportunities for cross ventilation. During winter, the lower angle of the sun penetrates deep into the ground floor with rising heat keeping the living space warm. Dormer windows across each elevation allow generous daylight throughout the day to create a delightful living space with a dramatic faceted roof above.

The Off Grid Jewel takes a classical approach of hyper logical plan and section and offsets this against a contemporary brief of climate demands and working from home alongside advances in digital technology. It develops the typical vernacular of a pitched roof house in the countryside with a rationality toward form, proportion, structure and daylight, while pushing the use of everyday materials to create joyful compositions.

Rediscovering Sketching.

My father was a journalist and when I was young, our home was full of newspapers.  As a kid I could fill weeks and weeks lying around and sketching on newspapers with a biro- we used to call it a ballpoint pen. I have a fond memory of getting a four-colour Bic biro from the local shop, it was a real highlight. This one had four tabs, with black, blue, green and red. It was easy to twist apart, so you could see the relationship between the spring and the four different biro nibs and tabs. The shop that sold these biros also had a bakery in the basement, which had a particularly distinctive smell which could fill the entire street. We lived in a modest neighbourhood in Islamabad in the nineties, with crisp white Corbusien tower blocks which had not aged gracefully. The communal stairwells had perforated brickwork painted white letting the sun dapple through and the balconies and terraces were enclosed by in-situ concrete painted white. Before the balcony balustrade hit the floor, there was a 50mm gap where the rebar was exposed and also painted white. These were beautiful details, now that I think back to them.

 A lot of people go to architecture because they were the kid who was good at drawing in school. I was no different, but with time and experience I realised that being able to create nice sketches has zero impact on your abilities as an architect. It is easy to get lost in a drawing, a model, or a visualisation even, which never translates into a built result. Given such a realisation, I spent the previous eight years doing extraordinarily little sketching, despite finding it enjoyable. I still do not really need to sketch unless it is therapeutic or meditative. If I get the thinking right, I should be able to create an elegant scheme on the first draft.

When lockdown happened, among the unending blur of zoom meetings, I began to realise that communicating architectural ideas verbally was near impossible. The sketches started as a means to communicate what I meant, but then I rediscovered how much quicker it was. The computer forces you to commit to dimensions with a tolerance of millimetres, which one can escape from with hand sketches, even when they are to scale. But most importantly, rediscovering sketching connected me to those earlier memories, of doodling with the four-colour ballpoint pens on my father’s old newspapers.

Bic four-colour ballpoint

The Melting Pavilion.

The Melting Pavilion is a competition entry, proposed as an abstraction of Arctic Sea ice. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, a sombre reminder of the ongoing climate crisis. My generation of designers is facing a climate catastrophe which should drastically impact how we think about the built environment, materiality and energy use. The melting pavilion aims to provocatively symbolise this crisis as the primary design brief for the coming decade.

The Melting Pavilion is completely static, yet appears to be in movement, transforming dynamically from one state to another. The design is articulated as four L shaped elements, deconstructed in varying orientations and at different points of sinking. Therefore, the proportion and perception of the pavilion is completely unique in each elevation.

A treated softwood structure is proposed, finished in cladding made from waste materials. Smile Plastics can supply panels made from recycled chopping boards and plastic packaging. The panels are completely weatherproof and can be easily machined, drilled, cut, CNC routed and fixed using adhesives and screws. In the ‘blue dappled’ finish, this material has a depth and vibrancy reminiscent of the Arctic landscape.

The pavilion is completely permeable in plan, arranged across a platform of seven floating pontoons on the canal. It is a prototype shelter which hopes to provide a temporary moment to pause and reflect on this site, as an encouragement to move toward an environmentally responsible future together.

The Melting Pavilion, Regents Canal 2020

Ornament and Grime.

“Poverty is not a disgrace. Not everyone can be born into feudal manor house. But to pretend such a thing to one’s fellow men is ridiculous, immoral. So let us not be ashamed of the fact that we live in a house with many others who are socially our equals. Let us not be ashamed of the fact that there are materials which would be too costly for us as building materials. Let us not be ashamed of the fact that we are people from the nineteenth century, and not those who live in a house which, in its architectural style, belongs to an earlier time.” Adolf Loos, 1898.

Kano’s video for Pan-Fried featuring Kojo offers a collage of deteriorating housing developments across East London. He contrasts celebratory lyrics against imagery that portrays something entirely different - “We celebrate life non-stop, cos we made it off the block”, in contrast to the visual of excessive fly tipping outside derelict housing. Much of the cinematography is focused on the architecture, and when people are shown as well as buildings, it is the buildings which occupy the majority of the frame. Pan-Fried describes the culture of this part of London authentically, trying to communicate that this urban decline wasn’t just something to be dismissed or scoffed at, it was a catalyst for a subculture which should be cherished. In the chorus, Kojo sings as his hair is being groomed by a young woman, in-flux as opposed to the final presentation - a clear reference to changing urbanism. Kano makes the same point that Adolf Loos made in 1898, via a different medium.

Most people’s perception of a building very rarely has anything to do with its style. When I moved to London as a kid, I had a very neutral perception of such council estates. I had spent my early years in cliché modernist developments in an entirely different cultural context, crisp white towers surrounded by landscaping etc. Yet most British people at the time associated this with the deteriorating reputation of social housing and poverty. By 2020, we have gone full circle, where the brutalist icons are considered a part of national heritage and a renaissance of council housing is taking root. As a teenager, I would have associated Balfron tower with the hood, now I think of lucrative property investment. I had this discussion with a colleague who pointed out that the design of the buildings remains unchanged – rather the societal perception of the design has changed. Architecture cannot be more powerful than politics.

More than a hundred years ago, it was declared that Ornament is Crime. Yet, no matter how revolutionary at the time, stylistic and material preferences of one era will become ornamentation and imitation for the next. An in-situ concrete wall, or the latest recycled eco-plastic rainscreen can also be used as ornamentation without any function much like a baroque style moulding, they are just communicating something else. Kano’s video shows that buildings which were rejected in the noughties can become a cultural driving force for the twenties. So equally, let us not be ashamed of the fact that not everyone can splash out half a million on a property in a brutalist icon, to harp back to this style in design terms would be equally immoral. As an architect, you cannot control society’s perception of a material finish in the long term, you must innovate at a level that goes beyond stylistic communication and sinking budgets on specification and product displays. The best things about buildings don’t have to cost anything.

Pan-Fried by Kano feat Kojo, 2019

The Daylight Factor.

For the past few years, I have been experimenting with daylight analysis and energy models on projects at concept design stage. The first step is a general analysis of daylighting, which can be measured in Lux as seen in the first diagram. This metric summarises the performance throughout the whole year considering design, location and weather. A value of 300 Lux or above is usually desirable for homes, so you can check if you will have issues in any of the spaces and adjust the design accordingly. However, this is more of a general check as I do not necessarily want to obliterate every corner with maximum daylight, usually aiming for a composition of darker and lighter spaces. The annual daylight metric can be summarised into a diagram of over and underlit spaces as shown in the second image. In this example, I amended the design by moving entrance lobbies with an additional strip of rooflights toward the northern edge.

The second image shows the Spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA) analysis. This describes how much of a space receives enough daylight, summarised as the percentage of floor area that receives the minimum illumination level for a minimum percentage of occupied hours. For example, if a space receives at least 300 Lux for at least 50% of the time it will be occupied. It is a climate-based analysis, based on a location specific weather file and is an accurate predictor of as built performance. A value of 55% is considered adequate and above 75% is considered excellent. In the example I used sDA to provide a quick snapshot as I developed the design, adjusting glazing volumes and floor to ceiling heights accordingly.

Annual Sun Exposure (ASE) is showing you how much of a room is getting too much sun which can cause visual or thermal discomfort. It’s similar to sDA but it measures the percentage of floor are that receives 1000 Lux for at least 250 occupied hours in one year. It can be a useful indicator of thermal comfort issues, but worth bearing in mind that it’s only measuring sunlight. Ideally you want under 50%, but my experience indicates that this can be difficult and not necessarily desirable in most cases- particularly passive solar designs relying on direct sunlight during winter months.

The second series of tests is concerned with the atmospheric or poetic quality of lighting as opposed to a purely numeric analysis. Daylight factor is an annual simulation of the daylight ratio under overcast sky conditions, providing the worst-case scenario of a design. It also considers ground reflections, window transmittance, and interreflections from room surfaces. Generally, 2% and above is considered acceptable for most spaces. However, this is also the most interesting analysis, as it clearly highlights the most poetic spaces that are fluctuating in daylight factor. For example, if one was to take a daylight factor analysis for a cathedral, it would not look dissimilar to what’s illustrated for the living spaces for this proposal. The values and fluctuations seen in the proposed living space are comparable to the quality of light found in some galleries and museums.

I also looked at the direct sunlight hours during the winter months, as illustrated in the second diagram. This confirms the ambition for the passive thermal strategy, where placing a control mechanism in the roof will aid the heating and cooling of the dwelling. For this project, this analysis fed into a strategy relying on thermal mass with the winter sun alongside stack via roof openings in the summer months. At this point I would also create a simple energy model. In this case, a draft analysis revealed a predicted energy use of 145 kWH/m² per year. This is a 48% reduction in energy use as the existing traditional structure with no insulation would use an estimated 300 kWH/m² per year. This can be refined further at technical design stage by looking at element performance. To give a simple example, you may see that the wall conduction is having a bigger impact on the heating load than the glazing specification. To reduce overall energy use it would be more productive to beef up the insulation by 50mm as opposed to going from double to triple glazed windows etc.

I have worked with analysis tools and have had a keen interest in Bioclimatic Design for some time, but recently became relaxed on the importance of this level of analysis, maybe because it is not a Building Regulations requirement. The Standard Assessment Procedure required by the Building Regulations literally means nothing- it is not location specific and does not even take occupancy factors into account, blindly pushing toward renewables despite context. I think it’s important to get away from this tick-box approach toward sustainability. Regardless, I wrote this to remind myself that any successful strategy toward reducing energy use must start from the outset.