New Makers Bureau is an award winning RIBA Chartered Architecture Practice making environmentally and socially conscious buildings.
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We make buildings with passion and purpose that tread lightly on the earth. We consider the finite and precious resources we have and deploy them with thought and care. In all our projects, we’re committed to using less and making more with less. We value re-use, adaptation and retrofitting. And we’re holistic in our approach to sustainability.
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We work together with our clients in a spirit of collaboration, and through a process of hands-on workshops, dialogue and discovery. We use our imagination to find resourceful ways to fulfil the brief and work hard to make the most of the project and the planet’s resources.
Meet our founder
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James Hampton
Founding Director
BSc (Hons) DipArch ARB RIBA
James is the Founding Director of New Makers Bureau. He established the practice to make architecture that is designed both for its experiential quality and environmental value. He wants to reconnect architecture practice with making, and to explore the tactile and sensual experience of buildings. He believes that we should design buildings, placing as much value on how they make us feel as how well they work. James studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London where he graduated with a distinction and later qualified as an architect. He has worked for a number of leading architecture practices including Will Alsop and Studio Egret West, where he led the Park Hill project, Europe’s largest listed building winning the Architect’s Journal Retrofit award and reaching the RIBA Stirling prize shortlist. Before founding New Makers Bureau James co-founded Periscope, a combined architecture and landscape practice. James has lectured both in the UK and internationally and has taught at degree and masters level at the Bartlett where he currently teaches in the masters school.
In my education and the early years of my career the environmental impact of making buildings wasn’t a particularly hot topic. There were a few outliers - architects who were starting to address environmental issues through their work but, to be frank, I was too obsessed with becoming an architect to think too much beyond the here and now.
Then, a decade or so later when I qualified, I realised: what’s the point in making buildings if they’re damaging the planet and ruining my children’s and others' futures? Since then, I’ve been learning - educating myself on how to do it. My particular interest lies in embodied carbon, as it feels like the part of the whole life carbon puzzle that still hasn’t been fully addressed. As our national energy supplies become decarbonised over the next two-three decades, the energy our buildings’ consume in-use will become less carbon intensive and as a proportion of this whole life carbon, embodied energy will increase (from about 25% now to perhaps 40% or more).
This challenge excites me as a designer: how can we adopt practices that significantly reduce embodied carbon through the reuse or recycling of materials, through reducing the amount of ‘stuff’ we need to build or through using natural materials that hold in carbon (like timber or hemp etc).