James Hampton Director
Architecture education
When I studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, the environmental impact of making buildings was not a particularly hot topic. There were outliers, architects who were beginning to address sustainability through their work, but to be frank, I was too obsessed with becoming an architect to think much beyond the here and now.
Qualifying as an architect
A decade or so later, when I qualified, something shifted. What is the point in making buildings if they are damaging the planet and ruining my children's futures, and everyone else's? Since then I have been educating myself on how to do it better. My particular interest is embodied carbon, the part of the whole life carbon puzzle that still has not been fully addressed, and the area where architects can make the most significant difference right now.
Sustainable architecture and low carbon design
As our national energy supply decarbonises over the next two to three decades, the carbon our buildings consume in use will become less significant. Embodied carbon, by contrast, will grow as a proportion of whole life carbon, from roughly 25% now to perhaps 40% or more. That shift makes the design decisions we make today, about materials, structure and how much we build at all, increasingly consequential.
This challenge genuinely excites me as a designer. How do we significantly reduce embodied carbon through the reuse and recycling of materials? How do we reduce the amount of new material we need in the first place? How do we specify natural materials like timber and hemp that store carbon rather than releasing it? How do we make the process of construction less wasteful? These are the questions that drive New Makers Bureau's work as a sustainable architecture practice in London.
Bio
James Hampton is the Founding Director of New Makers Bureau, an award-winning RIBA Chartered sustainable architecture practice based in south London. He established the practice to make architecture that is designed for both its experiential quality and its environmental value, reconnecting architectural practice with making and with the tactile, sensory experience of buildings. He believes buildings should be designed with as much attention to how they make us feel as to how well they work.
James studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, graduating with distinction, and later qualified as an architect. He has worked for a number of leading practices including Will Alsop and Studio Egret West, where he led the Park Hill project in Sheffield, Europe's largest listed building, which won the Architects Journal Retrofit Award and was shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize. Before founding New Makers Bureau, James co-founded Periscope, a combined architecture and landscape practice.
James has lectured in the UK and internationally and has taught at degree and masters level at the Bartlett, where he currently teaches in the masters programme.
New Makers Bureau works across London on sustainable home extensions, retrofit architecture, cultural buildings and community spaces, with a particular focus on low carbon design, embodied carbon reduction and creative reuse of existing buildings.