The Engine Hall at Manchester’s People’s History Museum began life as part of a hydraulic pumping station. On Tuesday 10 November it was the venue for a RIBA and VitrA panel on the future of architectural experimentation. The building was a good place to put one of the questions we’d already put to the evening’s chair, architectural writer and curator Samantha Hardingham. How much building do we need to do in the first place?
In her reply, Hardingham is clear it starts with an inspection of what's already there. Is there a building worth adapting? What would the site mean for the people who need to reach it, or for the other services they use? What would the project do to biodiversity? Starting again may be the right answer. Finding out takes work, and that work ought to happen before the decision has effectively been made.
In a town with an empty shop, a former civic building or a community space in need of repair, that changes the conversation. A brief for a replacement and a brief for making an existing building usable ask different things of an architect. They also ask different things of the people who will pay to heat it, maintain it or get there every week.
The Royal Institute of British Architects programme brought together JJ Cliff of Studio Weave, Giles Miller of Giles Miller Studio, Jonathan Mizzi of Mizzi Studio, Yan Wing Le of Common Practice and Charlie Butterwick of Architecture Unknown. It set material innovation and sensory design alongside working with nature, co-design and collective making. The Manchester panel was part of the eighth year of the RIBA and VitrA talks partnership. Its 2026 theme, Excellence in Design, marked 60 years of RIBA’s awards programme and 30 years of the Stirling Prize.
Hardingham makes the distinction between an experimental building and an experimental way of working. She points to the Crystal Palace as a historical experiment in modular construction and to the Pompidou as a project whose engineering, public role and urban ambitions were bound up with one another. Today, she suggests, the experiment might be in one part of a project. It could be the choice of a structural material, a method of manufacture or the way a team tests how a space will feel to the people using it.
It could also be in who writes the brief. Hardingham points to Marmalade Lane, a cohousing development in Cambridge, as a case to look at when asking what meaningful participation can do. She argues that when residents help define a project, shared facilities, accessibility and long-term use can become priorities from the outset.
That raises a useful question for anyone invited to a consultation. Which decisions can we still change? A chance to comment on drawings has its place. A chance to decide what those drawings need to solve comes earlier. If a neighbourhood needs an affordable room that can be used on a wet Tuesday evening, that belongs in the brief alongside the architect’s and the client’s priorities.
For Greater Manchester’s Architecture Unknown, community involvement extends into how buildings are made. The practice describes residents as partners in construction and uses WikiHouse, an open system for assembling buildings from digitally cut components, in its community-led work. This gives the panel’s interest in collective making a practical question. Which parts of the work can people take on themselves, and where do they need the time, money or expertise of the professionals?
Hardingham is equally interested in how to test a design before people have to live with it. She suggests working directly with those most affected and using models, observation and digital tools to make different experiences of a space tangible. The effects of a building can be financial, environmental or personal, and they can outlast the team that designed it. She argues for feeding what people learn back into subsequent designs and gives clients a continuing responsibility for upkeep.
That makes a return visit worth putting in the brief too. Can the groups a building was intended for still afford to use it? Does it work for someone arriving alone, or for someone who needs a quieter place to sit? Which decisions have made it easier to look after, and which have left the people running it with a problem? Those are questions an award citation or an opening photograph can rarely answer. They are also questions residents can help architects ask before anyone draws the first line.
