3 June 2020 – My practice, together with Timothy Smith & Jonathan Taylor Architects, has won a place on London Borough of Southwark’s Framework Agreement for Architectural Design Services. We have qualified on Lot 7, an innovative lot which sought “talented, idealistic” new practices for civic and public housing projects. Our London and Amsterdam based team was selected from a shortlist of 365 submissions for all seven lots. The selection consisted of two rounds; a technical written submission and an interview presentation. The cooperative Smith Taylor & Van der Heijden have previously collaborated on housing designs within the Mayor of London’s ADUP framework (Bridgewater en Binsey Walk).

The appointment to Southwark’s Framework Agreement represents an exciting opportunity to develop our investigations into architectural language, the friction between the idealised and the realisable, and tradition as a carrier of cultural knowledge. When launching the framework submission in the Architect’s Journal Leo Pollack, Southwark Council cabinet member for social regeneration said: We mean to discriminate in favour of those architects who bring full care and consideration to their designs, who will fight for the details that really make a difference to our residents, we want architects whose ideals are intact.