The latest episode of our podcast is international architecture practice AHMM co-founder and future RIBA president Simon Allford. Simon talks to us about his approach to architecture, the power of ‘everyday buildings’ to uplift and delight people, and picks his top three living spaces – listen to the episode here. 

Simon’s entry to the world of architecture began young. His father, David Allford, worked with Maxwell Fry on the Festival of Britain; later became a partner of F. R. S. Yorke (who, incidentally, wrote The Modern House, from which we take our name), and worked on large projects like Gatwick Airport and St Thomas’ hospital in London. Simon recalls holidays spent looking at buildings by Alvar Aalto or Le Corbusier, but says he was never pressured into architecture by his father – instead, coming to the profession by himself after his schoolboy dream of becoming a footballer didn’t materialise.

Simon studied first at the University of Sheffield and then at the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he would meet his three partners at AHMM: Jonathan Hall, Paul Monaghan and Peter Morris. It was after they graduated that the four young men would get together to talk about ideas they had relating to ‘buildings of the city’ and ‘architecture existing everywhere’. The first competition they landed, a bus station in Walsall, West Midlands, elevated an everyday building to a sophisticated but simple design that integrated a public square and ‘civilise[d] the experience of bus travel’. 

In their countless projects since – everything from health centres, schools, art galleries, skyscrapers, residential projects and more – AHMM, who now employ over 500 people, have made manifest their human-focused approach to architecture, one that recognises that when their job ends, the life of their buildings can begin, and one that is predicated on the belief that good design can offer ‘delight as well as utility’. One of Simon’s own projects, a stepped apartment building in Bermondsey, made in collaboration with Roger Zogolovitch’s Solidspace, illustrates this beautifully. 

Tune in now to find out what Simon picked as his top three living spaces, and hear him reflect on his decades-long career, including why he recently put himself forward to be the new president of RIBA, a position he’ll take up in 2021. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode, and if you could rate and review us, we’d be more than grateful. Happy listening.